


In Remission

by halophiles



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Body Horror, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Platonic Relationships, Transformation, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-09-22 09:36:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 43,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9601994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halophiles/pseuds/halophiles
Summary: In a string of hastily made decisions, Keith does the irreversible, and decides the only way to redeem himself is to get Shiro back in one piece. However, the journey he embarks on is long and arduous, and has the potential to reap little reward at the cost of his humanity. Finding Shiro in an endless expanse of darkness seems unrealistic at best, and impossible at worst.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first story on ao3, and I'm planning it for it to be a long haul. Tags may change when I need them to. Also, it's not really proofread so apologies in advance.

Keith suspected everyone hated the quiet the most. Not that he was the most talkative of the bunch, not by a long shot. It was the silent half-nods of acknowledgement and the indifferent shrugs which he figured got everyone down. Between the mumbled words and the half-eaten bowl of green goo in front of him, he felt spent. It had been two weeks since Team Voltron had its second battle against Zarkon, and this one had left him wounded and feeling hurt in more ways than one.

It had been two weeks since Shiro had disappeared without a trace.

When the news had broken, everyone had looked immediately at him. He had hated that. He still hated that so much. Just thinking about that moment made him tighten his fist, made him want to thrash about. He couldn’t stand to have so many eyes on him; he had frozen up, choked. There was a pressure on his chest that he had never quite felt before. 

Shiro was nowhere to be found, and funnily enough, Keith had been given instructions in case this exact thing happened. 

“I want you to lead Voltron,” Shiro had said, or at least he had said something like that. In fact, he had said it many times in recent memory. At least twice since they crash landed on that craggy gray planet with nary a hope of rescue. Keith had brushed it off at the time; Shiro was delirious with fever and thought he was dying, and Keith could forgive him.

Now that he was gone, the crushing weight of all the responsibility that Shiro had been bearing suddenly fell onto him, and Keith felt as though he was going to collapse. Did Shiro know? Is that why he told Keith? So he could abandon Voltron?

“Keith?”

Keith pushed those thoughts aside, looking at his tightly closed fist on the table. He slowly released his fingers, and blood flooded back into his palm. He made a noncommittal noise at the air. He wasn’t exactly sure who had spoken.

“You should finish your food.”

The phrase was so weirdly parental, so much like an adult chiding a child that Keith half expected Shiro to have rematerialized at the table, as though everything he had experienced thus far had been a dream. When he saw that it was Lance that said it, who was the only one who dared to look at him, his face fell. He could see Lance’s brows furrow and his shoulders tighten, unsure of how Keith was going to react. He was wound like a cat ready to flee.

“Yeah,” Keith breathed, and he saw Lance deflate with relief. Everyone was so quiet at the table, it was killing him. Pidge and Hunk tried not to look at him, for fear they would antagonize him. Hunk seemed to have a hard time finding a place to look, having long finished his food. 

“You know,” Keith started, clearing his throat so it didn’t sound so scratchy from disuse. “You don’t have to stay at the table.”

All three of his fellow paladins seemed to shift uncomfortably in their chairs. It was an unnecessary comment, he knew they weren’t going to leave. They wanted to see him eating, they wanted to get him talking; to say anything, really, that wasn’t about Shiro or the situation they were in. Maybe they were waiting for his direction, waiting for him to take up the mantle as black paladin and lead Team Voltron to Zarkon’s central command and save the day, and also Shiro, and then everything could go back to normal. If only things were that simple.

They had raided Galra base after Galra base, upturning files and smashing their way through robotic soldiers to get their hands on any information they possibly could about Shiro. There was nothing. Not even an inkling of anything that could help them find him. They all assumed, if the Galra had him, that they could find him with ease. But they were wrong; Shiro could be anywhere. A nameless slave, most likely lost in a million different tired and haggard faces. But, everyone reasoned, if Pidge could locate Matt, then they could probably locate Shiro. However, they didn’t really find Matt, did they? They just knew he was somewhere not in Galra space-- safe, hopefully, and alive for now.

“Keith, stop it.”

It was Pidge this time who spoke, Keith could make that much out from under his mop of hair. At first he was confused, but then he looked down at his hand, wound so tightly around his spoon that it was shaking. The spoon made a rattling noise in his fist. He dropped the utensil and placed one hand in the other, rubbing at his skin. His fingers trembled in his other hand’s grasp.

“...Okay, dinner’s over, come on,” said Lance, who pushed his chair out from the table and collected both his and Hunk’s plate. He meandered over to Pidge, gathered up her dishes, and then hesitantly made his way over to Keith. He extended a free hand, the other dishes balanced on his other arm like he was a waiter. Keith looked down at his unfinished goo, and then handed it to Lance. 

“I…” Pidge started, and everyone looked at her. She seemed to shrink even smaller than she was. “I can look again, Keith, if you want, I have time and I wouldn’t mind--”

“No,” Keith said, barely above a whisper.

“You never know, maybe I made a mistake, I think if I tweak the search this--” she started again, a little more forceful this time, as though if she said it louder it would be true.

“Please, Pidge, no.” His voice was a squeak at this point, and Pidge didn’t have the heart to continue. Lance had taken this opportunity to deposit the dishes in the kitchen, leaving just Hunk, Pidge, and Keith in the dining room. Keith couldn’t remember if Allura and Coran had been at dinner at all, or if they’d left when they were done like people should have.

Keith scooted out his chair and slowly rose to his feet. “I’m going to be in my room, if anyone needs me. You can...knock, but, if I don’t answer,” he began, and Hunk and Pidge swiftly nodded, allowing him the luxury of not finishing his sentence.

The hallways of the Castle of Lions were as quiet as they ever had been. The only sound Keith heard was the echo of his own footsteps against the not-quite metallic floors. He felt as though he was just now appreciating the sheer size of the Castle that he had called his home for months. There were so many hallways and passages, emergency chutes and maintenance tunnels that it was a wonder he had not gotten himself lost before. It was just big enough for him to wander.

He wasn’t sure what brought him to the lower decks of the Castle. They hadn’t exactly gone into a state of disuse; Keith was almost certain there was some kind of robot or machine doing the cleaning down here, but they looked dark and dreary. This part of the Castle didn’t see people often, Keith supposed. The hangars for the lions were on the opposite side, which left a wide range of the Castle relatively empty. 

Eventually, he knew where his feet were taking him. He knew when he retrieved his dagger from his pocket, looking upon the blue symbol shining bright in the darkness of the bowels of the Castle.

“Paladin.”

Keith looked up. In front of him was a lounge of some sort, meant maybe for whoever used to live down here in the Castle 10,000 years ago. A wide open window exposed the inky blackness of space, dotted by brilliant stars. He was sick of space by now.

In the middle of the window, with his back to Keith, stood Kolivan. There was something unnerving about the Galra, Keith thought as he approached him. Not just Kolivan, but his race as a whole. Even though they differed greatly, the great height the Galra reached made them formidable foes, and Kolivan was no exception. He stood a good three-fourths the height of the window, and was cloaked in the light of the stars, a white sheen on the armor of the Blade of Marmora.

Despite hesitating, Keith ultimately joined Kolivan by the window. There was nothing but black for miles out there, and it reminded Keith of just how big the universe itself was. Finding Shiro in an endless expanse of darkness seemed unrealistic at best, and at worst? Impossible.

“Tell me,” Keith began, starting when the silence became unbearable and stopping only because he was unsure of himself. Kolivan’s ear twitched. He gave Keith a few moments to collect himself.

“Tell me,” he started once more. “Tell me you have someone, anyone.”

When it became clear that was all Keith was going to give, Kolivan peered down at him with unblinking yellow eyes. “I’m not quite sure I understand, Paladin.”

“On the inside,” Keith stuttered, his eyes meeting Kolivan’s. A shiver went down his spine--it was unsettling, no pupils; the eyes of the Empire. “Someone who can see, who knows, who knows anything about Shiro. Please, just anyone.”

Kolivan took a breath, and let it out as a heavy sigh. “A spy. Like Thace. Or Ulaz.”

“Yes,” Keith breathed, hopeful.

“They died.”

Keith looked down. He felt as though he had been scolded. “I know. I’m sorry.” He fought with himself briefly, wondering what exactly to say next without sounding completely insensitive. He didn’t know if the Galra, especially the militant types, were capable of being offended; but he was trying to be civil despite the desperation in his voice.

“I need someone on the inside. You said the Blade of Marmora would help,” Keith asserted firmly, gaining a second wind and no longer afraid to look Kolivan in the eye. “All I saw… All I saw was you and Antok, and Thace... Ulaz. What about the others? There are more of you.”

Kolivan turned directly towards Keith, away from the window. He was such a hulking figure that Keith took a step back. His lips seemed to twitch, giving Keith a flash of dangerously sharp teeth. 

Suddenly, Kolivan turned back towards the window, as if to compose himself. “Unlike Zarkon’s...ideology, if you could call it that, I believe every life is worth something. It would be unfair to ask any of the Blade of Marmora to risk their lives for someone they have never met; a human--an alien, who had been experimented on by the Witch, no less.”

“I never mentioned them being the ones to go and find Shiro,” Keith pointed out, feeling queasy. His stomach was roiling with nerves.

“Regardless, there are countless Marmora just waiting to enter Galra space to subvert the Empire--but they are waiting to do so effectively, not commit suicide via rescue mission,” Kolivan pointed out.

“Ulaz thought Shiro was worth it,” Keith spat.

“Ulaz was an ideologue,” Kolivan replied.

“No! You don’t get to do that to him, not when he's dead and he can't defend himself,” Keith shouted suddenly, forcing Kolivan to face him by pulling him by the arm, pulling the Galra down to his height. Kolivan retracted and made a hissing noise, but that didn’t stop Keith. “Shiro is worth the effort! Shiro was the only thing that brought and kept Voltron together. He was--he is our leader! He’s as vital to us as you are to the Blade of Marmora.” Keith wondered if he sounded as pathetic as he thought he did. Voltron wasn’t the only thing that Shiro kept from breaking apart. It was so painfully apparent. “Please.”

After the outburst, they stood in silence for many minutes, maybe admiring the view of space from the window, maybe just waiting for the other to break the quiet. Keith didn’t know what else to say. He was out of options. Pidge couldn’t find Shiro, the Galra base data was fruitless, and now the Blade of Marmora wouldn’t help him. He could understand why, but he didn’t want to. He had held onto a slim sliver of hope until now. He would never see Shiro again. Keith had tallied up another lost family member. His brother, gone, and his last wish unfulfilled. Keith could never take his position as the black paladin. He could never lead Voltron. He failed.

He felt his vision go blurry, but he refused to cry in front of Kolivan. His lip trembled, and he bit it so hard he could taste blood. His fingers curled back tightly into fists, and maybe if he just slammed himself hard enough against the glass he could break the window and be sucked into the vacuum of space.

“The Blade of Marmora can’t help him,” rumbled Kolivan. Keith glowered at him, fists quivering, itching to break the weird nose on Kolivan’s face. There was a long pause as they both looked at each other with the intensity of the brightest suns.

“But you can.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: vomiting, illness.

Pidge knew Keith was sick.

She was no doctor, and he was hiding it carefully. But she could see it in tiny moments in between, his eyes fluttering as a wave of nausea washed over him when he turned, a thin sheen of sweat coating his forehead, the willingness to let Hunk or Lance help him with a menial task that had been assigned by Coran.

It had started a few days ago, as far as she could tell. It had been another unsuccessful night in terms of trying to rouse Keith out of his depressed stupor. She figured it would take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Keith wouldn’t improve in mere weeks. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still sobering to see him lag behind Lance and Hunk to breakfast, barely being able to meet people’s eyes when they wished him a good morning. 

This morning in particular had almost seemed like a good morning, at least at first. She entered the dining room before Lance and Hunk, taking in the view of the long table. At the head was Keith, who was busy tucking into what appeared to be a second helping of green goo.

“Morning,” Pidge greeted Keith.

He seemed to jump as though he’d been caught, his spoon hanging halfway out of his mouth. His lips twitched. “Good morning, Pidge.”

Well, it wasn’t a whisper at least. She grabbed a bowl off of the table and went to help herself in the kitchen. Out of the room, she could make out the faint noises of Hunk and Lance.

“Wow, Keith. I told you to eat dinner last night,” said Lance. His tone was mocking, but there was a twinge of surprise to it.

“I guess I’m just really hungry today,” Keith admitted, maybe a little sheepishly. Pidge couldn’t tell. “Hey, uh--would you mind grabbing me another?”

“Sure thing, no problem,” said Hunk. The clinking of plates preceded the Yellow Paladin into the kitchen. Pidge and Hunk both exchanged excited looks. Keith was eating, which was a definite start.

“You know,” Hunk started, siphoning goo from the machine. “Maybe we should make something special.”

Pidge shook her head. “I wouldn’t draw attention to it, you know how he gets.”

By the time Pidge and Hunk returned, Allura and Coran had seated themselves opposite of each other, near Keith. Keith was busy paying close attention to his empty bowl, and he was scraping green residue off the rim. When Hunk placed the bowl in front of him he thanked him quietly, and stuck his spoon in.

“Is that your third bowl?” asked Lance, who had also been delivered breakfast by Hunk.

“That,” Keith managed between bites, “is none of your business.”

For a while, the sounds of the Paladins eating were the only things that could be heard in the dining room. Pidge waited for a little bit, wondering if anyone would say anything before she took the initiative and spoke. 

“Princess, what’s the plan today?” she asked, and Lance nodded as though he meant to ask the question as well.

Allura seemed to mull the question over in her mind. “We are currently en route to an occupied planet in need of liberation, but it will take at least another day to even approach the system. While I would like to deal with the Galra in a timely manner, I am...reluctant to wormhole us,” she said, being served a plate by Hunk. The dining room was silent in the wake of her words, except for the sound of someone eating.

“Quiznak, slow down,” Lance said annoyedly, flicking his spoon accusatorily at the Red Paladin.

“Huh? Oh,” mumbled Keith, who had just finished off his third bowl with a satisfying slurping noise. “Sorry. I’m just really hungry.”

“Yeah, we can see that,” said Hunk with a hearty laugh. On his way to serve the final breakfast patron, Coran, he patted Keith on the back.

What happened next seemed to occur in a matter of seconds. Pidge watched Keith go white at the touch. He quickly pushed back his chair, managed a throaty, “Excuse me,” and vacated the premises.

In a flash, Keith was gone. Allura raised one white eyebrow and looked at the pile of plates Keith had accumulated. Hunk placed the final dish of green goo down at Coran’s place setting, and looked at everyone.

“Wasn’t me,” muttered Hunk, who then finally took his own seat. 

When Keith had returned minutes later, he seemed waxy and pale. His hair had been swept off of his forehead behind an ear, and it seemed as though it was staying in place thanks to a great deal of perspiration on his part. When he sat down again, he pushed the green goo so far away from him, so violently that Coran and Allura peered at their own dishes to make sure they were safe for consumption.

No one said anything about it.

Today, they were in the hangar. Even with Shiro gone, the Paladins of Voltron stopped for nothing. Liberation of planets was imperative and a priority. The Galra were suspiciously cool on their heels, and that gave them the upperhand. Or at least that was what Allura had said.  
Pidge lifted her helmet over her head and placed it delicately atop her head. There had been many times where she had forgotten to take off her glasses, and the results had been less than pleasant. The lions were at the ready, each lying dormant awaiting their pilots. The black lion was there as well, but everyone cautiously avoided it.

Lance and Hunk followed behind her, each adjusting their own suit of armor. She greeted them with a mock-salute, which they both responded to in kind.

“Afternoon, Pidge,” said Hunk, coming up to her side.

Pidge looked up at him, and then at Lance. “Hey, have you seen Keith?”

Hunk gave a full body shrug. “Uh, no. Haven’t seen him since...breakfast two days ago? Since that thing that happened.”

She managed a quiet, “Oh.”

After a momentary pause, Hunk asked, “You wanna say anything about that?”

She smiled nervously. “I don’t know what you want me to say about it.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little...weird?” Hunk pressed, hands out as though physically asking for Pidge to give him some material to work with.

“Maybe he has the flu,” Pidge offered.

“In a controlled environment in space? You’re smarter than that,” Hunk snorted, and then sighed. “I just...don’t want him hurting himself.”

Delicately, Pidge placed a small hand on Hunk’s arm. “I know. I’ll talk to him. Besides, it’s too risky to have anyone sick while we’re in Galra space.”

That seemed to satisfy Hunk, since he left to rendezvous with his lion. On his way there, Lance accosted him with a friendly elbow to the gut. The two laughed and meandered off somewhere, obviously not keen on sticking around unless they were being deployed.

Eventually, Keith did show up. He strode through the doors confidently, back straight, adjusting one of his gloved hands. Pidge strolled forward to greet him, and found that he wasn’t willing to meet her eyes.

“Hey, Keith,” Pidge whispered cautiously.

“Hi,” said Keith. Was he biting his tongue?

When he went to move forward, Pidge got in front of him. His features twisted for a moment; first a flash of uncertainty, and then anger.

“...Can I help you?” he asked slowly, almost nervously.

“You can tell me what’s wrong with you. I’m not having anyone sick going out there,” Pidge said, looking up at him. His bangs nearly covered his eyes, but that didn’t deter her from looking straight at him. He seemed tired.

“That’s funny,” he said with a breathy laugh that may have been too breathy. He went to pat her on the shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

“Seriously, Keith. It isn’t safe,” she cautioned. “Let Coran have a look at you, or something.”

Keith’s eyelids quivered, and Pidge wasn’t entirely sure whether or not Keith was actually looking at her when she spoke at him. He just continued on his previous thread, “You know, I said it’s funny, because... I’m supposed to be leading Voltron, and here you are, ordering me around.”

Pidge opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it. Keith moved around her, towards the lions. When she followed him with her eyes, she noticed he was only looking at the empty black lion. She felt a pang of sympathy that was quickly replaced by anger.

Only when Keith stopped moving towards the lions did Pidge start moving towards him. “Listen, Keith,” she started sharply. Her insides bubbled with anticipation. “You’re not the only person to lose people. I know how it feels. You need to...you just need to stop.”

Keith didn’t turn to face her, but that was fine. She could keep going; as long as he heard her she would manage. 

“My father…my brother. Shiro was missing before, remember? You stopped at nothing, you kept looking for him?” Pidge continued. “How do you think I feel? How do you think I feel knowing my family is missing, but Voltron is too important for me to be spending every moment of my life looking for them? I love Shiro too, we all do. Why are you so special that you think you get to be the one to be sad all the time?”

Her voice was wavering. She didn’t quite know where she was going with this. “And now you’re sick, and you’re hurting yourself--you’re going to push yourself too hard and we’re--I’m gonna lose another person. I know you’re in pain. I am too. We’re all hurting.”

Keith still hadn’t turned to face her, but he hadn’t moved either.

Pidge felt her eyes well up with tears. “Please tell me what’s wrong, Keith. I can help.”  
Very slowly, like grinding stone against stone, Keith turned. His eyes were lidded, and his breathing was labored.

“Pidge,” he breathed. He took one tentative step and decided that was too much for him. “Please don’t tell Allura.”

He doubled over in front of the Green Paladin, vomit erupting from his mouth like a faucet. She bent down to help him, but he pushed her away with a forceful arm. Whatever he was coughing up, it wasn’t green food goo. Red chunks were splattered across the white floors of the hangar.

Pidge felt a presence prickle across the back of her neck. Across the hangar, the red lion’s eyes glowed a bright yellow and it stirred to life. The great head of the robotic feline rose up and craned towards the Green and Red Paladins. It didn’t move otherwise, but instead took in what was unfolding in front of it. Pidge figured that was a good sign; maybe the lack of immediate action meant Keith wasn’t dying. 

Those yellow eyes bored into Pidge’s skull, and she swallowed thickly.

She knelt in front of Keith, who seemed spent. She tried to pick him up, but she wasn’t sure if she was strong enough. She placed a gloved hand on his clammy face; he was burning up.

“Keith,” she called to him, looking for any sign of recognition in his eyes. Red trails of vomit and pink, frothy spit dribbled out of his mouth. “I’m going to get you to a healing pod.”

Pidge was grabbed by her flight suit and yanked down to face-level by Keith. His eyes were wide and unseeing. “No, please,” he whispered. His breath smelled like death and it took everything for Pidge not to be sick in kind. 

She turned her head up so she could get some fresh air. Once she let out a few breaths, she dove back down to face Keith. There was no reasoning with him, and quite frankly, she wasn’t in the mood to argue. She was concerned for his safety, but was tired of his antics. Better this time to just submit than be denied and yelled at. She thought it unlikely she could take Keith, kicking and screaming, to the healing pods. Instead, she chose the next best option; the path of least resistance. 

Very quietly, she leaned down and whispered, “Tell me what I can do for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this far. Let me know what you think.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: more vomiting.

Of all the things Pidge thought she would be doing that day, carting Keith’s semi-unconscious body around the Castle of Lions definitely wasn’t one of them.

To be fair, she wasn’t the one doing the heavy lifting. Keith was currently swung over one of Kolivan’s massive shoulders. The Red Paladin hadn’t been able to speak very well, and every time he tried he would erupt into another violent vomiting session. What he had been able to get out was the name “Kolivan” about three times before he passed out, and Pidge was left to her own devices concerning what to do from there.

Kolivan hadn’t said a word to her, not even when she summoned him with her hailer. He had picked Keith up--less than delicately, she thought--and had swung him over his shoulder as though he weighed less than a feather. Galra were strong, so this didn’t surprise her. She was surprised, and relieved, however, that the force of the motion didn’t cause Keith to vomit again.

Speaking of. “Kolivan,” Pidge said, looking up at the huge alien.

One ear seemed to twitch in acknowledgement. Was that a go ahead to keep speaking?  
“What’s he throwing up? It’s solid,” she continued regardless, looking at the lines of red spittle dripping out of Keith’s mouth.

“If I had to assume...unnecessaries,” Kolivan rumbled, adjusting the Red Paladin on his shoulder. Keith’s head bobbed with the motion, and his eyes flickered open briefly before closing again.

Pidge was smart. She prided herself on that. But she had absolutely no idea what Kolivan meant. “Unnecessaries?” 

Kolivan cocked his head to the side thoughtfully. “Vestigial organs?” 

‘Unnecessaries’ may have been the most indifferent way to refer to the appendix and the tonsils that Pidge had ever heard. She wasn’t quite sure she wanted to know more, but before she could stop herself, she asked, “Why?”

Pidge could hear the Galra make a ‘harrumph’ noise. “To make room for new ones.”

She blanched and swallowed uncomfortably. Her eyes rested on Kolivan’s back, and then on Keith’s unconscious face. His eyebrows were knitted tightly, as though he was having a bad dream. His lips were quivering, teeth chattering.

“Put him down, I think he’s gonna vomit again,” ordered Pidge.

Kolivan had no interest in getting vomit on him it seemed, because he dropped Keith so quickly that, if Pidge hadn’t been there to break his fall, he surely would’ve fallen flat on his face. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and bent him over slightly. While she was holding most of his weight, he was able to rest his hands on his thighs.

True to Pidge’s prediction, a red and misty spray sputtered from Keith’s mouth. It was followed by a hearty deposit of dark globules which were far too gory for Pidge to want to keep looking. She turned her head to the side, feigning politeness.

They had been taking an alternate route to Keith’s quarters, but she knew that she would have to be the one to clean up the mess, much like she did in the hangar. Kolivan seemed to be a bystander in all this. He was simply the muscles, only there to cart Keith around.

While Keith was busy vomiting his heart out--not literally, Pidge hoped--she looked up at Kolivan. “There’s something I’m missing here.”

Kolivan shrugged. “It’s not my place to say.”

Pidge clenched her fist--the one that wasn’t holding Keith steady. “I think it is. I think you had something to do with this.”

“Pidge,” Keith breathed. He lifted one hand off his thigh to grab hers. “It’s…fine. Not his fault.” He tried to meet her eyes, and as cloudy and lidded as they were, Pidge decided to believe him.

She sighed heavily. She didn’t quite know what she was getting into here. Even though Keith was her teammate, she felt as though she was intruding on something between him and Kolivan. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately for her, her sense of right and wrong didn’t allow her to leave him. “Do you think you can walk, Keith? We can have Kolivan carry you again.”

Kolivan’s ears flicked in annoyance. She shot him a look.

“No...I can walk,” mumbled Keith. With aid from Pidge, he managed to get himself to his feet. His eyes were glued to the red, gelatinous mess on the floor. “I feel better now.”

“You’re missing organs now,” Pidge inserted, maybe a bit too harshly. Keith turned up his nose, unapologetic. “We need to get you to a healing pod.”

Keith bit his lip. Pidge noticed he was avoiding her gaze again. “Maybe, Pidge...there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Uncharacteristically, Pidge barked out a laugh. It was half nervous, half hysterical. It was the kind of thing that would have made Keith jump, if he wasn’t so sick.

“Okay,” Keith said with a sigh. He looked down at Pidge. “I have a...we have a plan. Kolivan and I, we have it under control.” He almost sounded like he was trying to reassure himself.

“Hardly,” Pidge sneered, folding her arms stubbornly.

“Pidge,” the Red Paladin began, placing both his hands on her shoulders. “I have a plan to find Shiro. I have a plan to find your family. But you have to trust me, trust us.” His tone was dead serious. The fever was fading from his eyes as he mustered up the courage to confide in Pidge, replaced with an intense fervor of determination.

The plan, as Keith put it on their way to his quarters, was in theory simple. Infiltrate Galra space in a way more intimate than anyone else could, and find Shiro. 

But Keith was speaking so quickly that Pidge had a hard time following. She assumed he was speaking the way he was, jumping from thought to thought like a madman, so she couldn’t find any points of contention. At some point in Keith’s monologue, Kolivan had wisely vacated the premises. He was half hysterical by the time he finished describing his plan, and Pidge wondered if he was going to be sick all over again. She hated seeing him like this.

By the time Keith was done describing his, in Pidge’s opinion, half-baked plan, she asked, “Do you ever...consider the implications of your actions?”

Keith blinked. “What?”

“You’re so wrapped up in a plan that has so many variables. It’s not going to work,” Pidge scoffed. Their footsteps echoed down the halls of the Castle of Lions. She wondered if anyone was going to find those vomit stains before she could clean them up.

“What do you mean?” asked Keith nervously.

“What I mean, Keith,” started Pidge, folding her arms in thought, “is that you can’t do it alone. And even if you had excellent help--me, for example--it still wouldn’t cut it.”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Pidge thought aloud. “Let’s just start thinking about how you would selfishly leave everyone in the Castle. We’d be down a Paladin--there’s no room for the red lion in Galra space, Keith.”

Keith looked down.

Pidge wasn’t done. “So, three Paladins of Voltron alone against the Galra empire. We’d be down a ‘leader’. Do you even know how long something like this will take?”

“No, but I’m sure--”

“I’m talking, Keith. I’ve searched every Galra database for Shiro. It’s clear he’s not a ‘normal prisoner’. He might not be a prisoner at all. He could be dead, or worse.”

Keith sucked in a breath. Pidge wished she could take back what she’d just said, but Keith needed to hear it. The Red Paladin bit his lip, as if trying to keep himself from saying something, from lashing out at her.

“Onto my second point,” Pidge began, and Keith elbowed her in the chest. His elbow bounced off her Paladin armor, but it still sent her a few feet back. She knew he probably didn’t mean to hurt her, but it had shocked her so much that she cried out, “Ow! What the heck, Keith!”

“I don’t want to hear this anymore,” Keith mumbled, resting on one of the walls. Her anger evaporated into a flicker of sympathy.

She laid her back against the wall and stood beside her fellow Paladin. Keith looked like he was going to cry, with his face as red as his lion, which was far worse than him looking like he was going to be sick. She could deal with his vomit. But tears? From Keith, of all people? Not so much. 

They stood with their arms folded and one leg kicked up against the wall for a bit, just two Paladins taking a quick respite in one of the many hallways of the Castle of Lions. It seemed almost normal for a second. But nothing had been normal since Shiro had disappeared.

“Onto my second point,” Pidge repeated, her voice barely more than a whisper. Keith turned away. “The quintessence injections.”

Keith was silent, but she could tell that he had winced.

“What on Earth were you thinking?”

“We’re not on Earth, Pidge.”

Pidge huffed. It was half a laugh, half a tired sigh. “How long is it going to take...to finish?”

“Kolivan doesn’t know.”

“Oh, so it was Kolivan that put you up to this?” Pidge waggled a finger accusatorily at him.

“Not exactly,” Keith muttered.

“How did you--how did he know it would do that?”

Keith sighed. “I’m not the only half-Galra to ever exist in the universe, Pidge.”

“I’m sorry, it just doesn’t seem like injecting quintessence into people’s spinal columns, and the how-to, would be common knowledge and practice for Galra,” she spat at him suddenly, and he shrugged defensively. “Or at least I’d assume that isn’t the case. Maybe their medical technology is so advanced, that it’s child’s play. Heck, maybe every prisoner is getting a free Galra tech arm because that’s just how they do it. Also, how are you even moving right now? Your spine must be incredibly bruised.”

“I can’t tell if I’m purple because of the bruises, or because of...you know,” Keith admitted honestly. Pidge felt like putting her head in her hands.

“Quiznak. What are we going to tell Allura?” Pidge thought aloud, all the while watching Keith stiffen.

“Nothing,” he spat savagely, using this opportunity to rise from his resting position and continue down the hall. “She doesn’t have to know until I can tweak the plan.”

“Tweak the plan? Keith! You don’t have a plan!” Pidge yelled down the hallway. “You have a million half-baked delusions of grandeur about saving Shiro!”

“I don’t see you doing anything,” he argued, his back to her.

“I have done everything!” Pidge screamed. Keith bristled. Her voice echoed off the walls of the Castle. “I have done everything for this team! I have done what I could to find Shiro. He isn’t there. He’s not anywhere. You will never be able to find him like this. You’ll never be able to find him just because you’re purple. Heck, Keith, you can’t even read their language. You can’t just assimilate yourself into a culture--a bloodthirsty, warmongering one no less--that you barely understand! It won’t work!”

“Then help me, or leave me alone,” Keith said quietly. “Because I’m not changing my mind.”

Then he rounded on her. It was so sudden that Pidge flinched, closing her eyes and bracing for impact. Thankfully, a blow never landed. “And if you get in my way, if you tell Allura. You’ll…” He seemed to chew on his words before he spoke. “You’ll regret it. Somehow.”

Pidge felt her eyes well up with tears. She blinked profusely. Was she scared? She didn’t feel scared. All she could hear was blood pumping in her ears. “You wouldn’t.”

Keith swallowed. He had his fist clenched so tightly that Pidge took a few cautious steps back. The time it took for him to respond seemed like eons to Pidge. 

Finally, Keith’s gaze wavered, and his eyes widened.His anger fizzled out like a snuffed flame. His fist unclenched, and all of his muscles seemed to relax. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Quiznak, Pidge. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to get angry like that. It’s the… It’s part of what’s… happening.”

Pidge sniffled.

“I’m...in pain, Pidge. I’m in so much pain. But I need to do this. I need a respite,” he whispered, giving the Green Paladin some breathing room. “Please, help me. You’re right, I can’t do this alone.”

She regarded him, her eyes wide with suspicion and maybe just a small hint of fear.

“I made an...irrational decision,” Keith mumbled. “Things are going to happen that are beyond my control.”

“Yes, you did,” Pidge said between grit teeth. “You made a terrible and selfish decision.” And now, Pidge thought, he should suffer for it.

“I’m scared,” Keith admitted, effectively slamming on the breaks Pidge’s train of thought. “I’ve put all my cards on the table. None of them look good and I can’t take them back. But...I can’t tell Allura. Especially not now. If I don’t bring Shiro back, she’ll never want to even look at me. You have to believe me when I tell you this is the only option I have now.”

Pidge looked up at Keith and considered her options. As much as she hated to admit it, Allura would never want to look at him again. She surveyed Keith and his very human features. The black hair, those violet eyes. Would all of that disappear within a matter of days? How many painful hoops would Keith have to go through until this was done?

“You signed your humanity away, by doing what you did,” Pidge mumbled at him. “And now you’re scared you did it all for nothing.”

“I really don’t like the way you phrased that. It sounds so final. I’m still me. I still will be me,” Keith said between a half nod of agreement. “But, you’re right. I was desperate. I wasn’t thinking. I need something to show for it.”

Pidge nodded absently. “Do you know how long you can hide it?”

Keith shook his head. “I wish I did.”

“Then we’re on the clock,” Pidge declared, stepping past him. She took off her helmet and shook out her hair. It was time for the glasses to come back on. “C’mon, Keith, we have work to do.”

Keith blinked, obviously perplexed. He followed after her like some sort of lost puppy, surprised by Pidge’s sudden change of heart. “W-where are we going?”

She turned and faced him. He stopped a few feet away from her, as if he was almost afraid to approach her. “You’re--we’re going to find Shiro. But.” She let the sentence hang there.

“But?” Keith pressed.

“We’re gonna do it my way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments. It means a lot. I love the feedback. I'm a horrible, gluttonous monster that ingests all replies and mulls them over until the end of days.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A filler chapter? While I plan what happens next? Or calm before the storm? Who knows. The whole 'writing a fic' experience has been very therapeutic thus far.
> 
> EDIT: I am experiencing some continuity issues. Because of this, I will take some time and rewrite things. I don't feel as though I was giving this piece ample attention considering I was using it as stress relief during a very rough week. Might not update for a while.

Pidge’s way, Keith found out, was filled with learning.

He couldn’t even fathom where she had got the information. He had been in his room all day, lamenting his eventual exit, when Pidge had burst into his room.

“Pidge--what?” Keith had nearly sputtered, jumping off of his bed in surprise.

“You. Read. Now,” she had said, entering his room. She had carried no books, so he had no idea what she had actually meant by that, until she grabbed his hailer and touched it to her own. Files downloaded in an instant, and then Pidge had left as soon as she had come. Things between them were still a little bit tense.

Reading from the hailer, something that was akin to a smartphone at best, was difficult. But Pidge insisted. At first, Keith had tried to feign disinterest in the various topics and texts that she had provided him with. Ultimately, he found himself flipping through virtual page after virtual page, engrossed in what he was reading.

Information about the Galra.

Information about his mother.

Keith thought about her a lot. For starters, he wondered what she could have been like, what she looked like. Heck, for the most part he wondered how his parents even met. What was that like, for his dad? Did she look human, like Keith did? Did quintessence have something to do with everything? Was that all that separated Keith from the Galra, in the end?

Did his father know that his mother belonged to one of the most despised races in the galaxy?

With a huff, he flipped another page on the hailer. He was curled up on his bed, with the sheets pulled up on his knees. He hadn’t had the energy to get out of bed today. Every time he turned, a searing shot of pain zipped up his spine, rendering him paralyzed. Every time he tried to stand, an electric current seemed to travel through his back, causing his fingers to ache and twitch.

Keith, after much positioning, struck a comfortable pose on his bed where he could flip the pages of the virtual text without agitating any muscles in his back. Every ounce of pain was a reminder of what a stupid, desperate decision he had made.

He sighed and dropped one arm off the bed, his fingers wrapping around the rim of a trash can that he kept close at all times. Like the plethora of virtual texts, Pidge had also shoved the trash can at him, very gently, and told him she wasn’t going to play janitor for him anymore. Luckily for him, the trash can had remained empty all day. The bouts of vomiting had been replaced by deep and aching pains that made Keith almost prefer the nausea.

Keith thought about the night that everything went wrong as he turned to the next page. This particular passage was about dining etiquette. He found that, for the most part, dining etiquette was virtually nonexistent in Galra culture. After a few more sentences, the paragraph having something to do about when to eat without using your hands, he found that he could no longer focus. It was almost as if clouds had gathered at the corners of his vision, and he found himself slipping. His mind was wandering, images of long needles and glowing yellow liquid flashing behind his eyes. He shuddered, and his spine lit up like a live wire. He felt his eyes roll back and his hands splay wide.

The hailer fell out of his grasp and dropped to the floor with a satisfying clatter. His fingers shook and curled. Even though he was lying flat, he felt as though he was folding in on himself infinitely. His lungs compressed, and he found that he could no longer breathe. He felt a primal urge to scream, but suppressed it. If anyone else but Pidge or Kolivan came (and it wouldn’t be Kolivan who showed up, that much was obvious), Keith wouldn’t know what to do. How does one explain to a fellow Paladin of Voltron that he was having quintessence induced, sporadic seizures in bed? That he was responsible for, no less.

He felt blood well up in his mouth, and he mustered all of his strength to turn himself onto his side. His back blossomed in pain in protest. It felt as though someone had taken a branding iron to his spine. He watched through his clouded vision as blood leaked onto the white sheets of his bed. Had he bitten off his tongue? He really hoped he hadn’t.

When his vision left him, Keith tried his best to focus on breathing. He could deal with pain. He wasn’t dying. Kolivan had assured that, while the procedure would be painful, it would most likely not be fatal. Most likely. If he could’ve, he would’ve smiled right about then.

That fateful night, Keith had followed Kolivan into his quarters. It was so dark in the underbelly of the Castle of Lions, so empty. The only light that seemed to grace the pair was from the space outlook, and they had abandoned that in favor of retiring to Kolivan’s rooms.

“You still haven’t really specified,” Keith had begun, “what it is exactly I can do.”

“It is quite simple, really,” Kolivan had answered. “The Blade of Marmora cannot risk any more unwilling Galra lives. But you are not unwilling. You are practically biting at the bit. Waiting to pounce.”

Keith had shot him an annoyed look, but Kolivan wasn’t even looking at him. The nerve this guy had, being so cryptic. “I can’t infiltrate anything.”

At Keith’s statement, Kolivan looked back. His yellow eyes glowed in the darkness. “Yet,” he said, giving the Red Paladin a shot of a rare, sharp, and toothy grin.

Keith’s vision returned nearly as soon as it had left him, knocking him out of his daydream. He sucked in a huge breath of air, as though he hadn’t breathed in years. His throat rattled, an ungodly noise, and whatever blood had been in his mouth had leaked out onto the sheets. His chest rose and his back arched, and he saw stars. He grabbed for the trash can again, and deposited whatever was left in his stomach into it. So much for the vomiting being over.

Overcome by tremendous thirst, he managed to rise from his bed. While his back protested, it didn’t render him immobile like it had so many times before when he tried to move. He took the opportunity to shuffle into the bathroom, one arm wrapped around his trusty waste basket, the other propped on the doorframe for support.

Keith reflection greeted him in the mirror as he struggled into the bathroom. He wasn’t very vain by any means, but he always felt as though he looked good. Today, that wasn’t the case. At best, he looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. At worst, he looked like he had been trapped in a cellar for ten years and had just been let out for air.

He leaned on the sink and rested his head to the mirror, gently setting the waste basket down next to him. The glass of the mirror was satisfyingly cool on his face, so he pressed his cheek to it. Suddenly, he was overcome with an incredibly unfamiliar feeling: pleasantness.

The mirror was possibly the best thing he had ever felt. It was so cold, ice cold. He leaned forward onto the glass and put all of his weight into it. A cool and flat surface to reduce his fever. Yes, finally. For the first time in what felt like eons, he was comfortable.

A gentle rumble rose from his throat, and bubbled up as a deep and rhythmic humming noise. He folded his nose into the coolness of the mirror, which dampened the sound. He carefully turned his face to the side, the cold surface soothing his aches and pains. With his nose free, the noise returned in all of its rumbly glory. It was almost chittery, like an insect. While it reminded him of cicadas in the summer, it was also not entirely unlike a purring cat. All in all, this was a noise he had never heard before, and he thought it so unusual that he opened his eyes to search for the source.

The noise stopped, and Keith felt his throat retract. He broke out in a cold sweat as he pried himself off of the mirror. Quickly, he put his hands to his throat and looked at his reflection in the mirror. Nothing visible, or apparently visible. Just the image of an incredibly startled Keith meeting his very wide eyes.

Keith shuddered. He placed his head in hands as he rested his elbows on the edges of the sink. His heart hammered in his chest. What was happening to him? It suddenly dawned on him how little he knew about what he was getting into. He halfheartedly reached for the glass resting on the side of the sink. He turned the faucet slowly, and just watched the water fill up the cup.

He pressed the glass to his lips and tilted it back. He swore he could almost feel the muscles in his neck that had created the rattling--he would be damned if he said purring--noise, and suppressed the urge to vomit again. He heard a shuttering noise, like a door opening, and yanked the glass away from his face. What the heck was that? He better have not made that noise either.

“Who’s there?” Keith tested. He tried to sound strong, but the question tumbled from his lips as a whisper. He reached for the scabbard on his belt, where his Marmora dagger hid, sheathed.

There was a pregnant pause before a familiar voice called, “Yo, Keith?”

“…What is it, Lance?” Keith all but growled. His voice wavered in the worst way, conveying how much of a fright the intrusion had given him. He placed the glass down on the sink, and nervously looked at his reflection. Still normal. Still human.

Striding out into his bedroom proper, he adjusted the cuffs of his jacket and popped his collar. Lance was in the doorway, seemingly reluctant to enter Keith’s room after receiving that grumbly greeting. Well, knowing Lance, he probably had entered Keith’s room uninvited and then thought better of it. The Blue Paladin greeted him with a salute, and Keith took note that he was decked out in his armor.

“We’re planetside, dude,” announced Lance, who was now posing in the doorway, one foot kicked up on the other side of the frame, effectively blocking his path.

“You had to come into my room to tell me that?” Keith asked, trying his best to keep his tone as neutral as possible. He wasn’t really focused on Lance, more so on the fact that he’d left the barf bucket unemptied in the bathroom.

“Well, I mean. Allura wanted to get you herself, because you’ve been MIA and all that, but Pidge suggested I go instead. In case you were sick, or worse, indecent,” Lance provided, folding his arms against himself. His armor plates clacked against each other as he did so. He made a little disgusted face as he finished his sentence. “Oh. By the way, you look really bad. You good?”

“Thanks for the concern,” Keith said between his teeth, eyes narrowed. Thanks, Pidge. “I’m fine.”

“Always,” grinned Lance. He got off the wall and gestured grandly towards the hallway. “Suit up, man. It’s time to rock and roll and all that good stuff.”

Keith shrugged and passed Lance by. He didn’t want to get too close to him, lest he try to put an arm around him or do something remotely fraternal like that. After Hunk had clapped him on the back at breakfast so many days ago, Keith found himself repulsed by the idea of being touched. If anything, he didn’t want to give Lance more fuel to fan the ‘tease Keith’ fire. It was burning brightly enough.

Lance hurried past him, not keen on arriving to the debriefing behind Keith. The Red Paladin shook his head, letting Lance run on ahead of him. There was a sense of normalcy he felt, getting ready for a meeting with his fellow paladins. For the first time in weeks, he felt a small smile grace his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thank y'all for commenting. My goal is to update once every 1-2 days unless I burn out, because I feel like routine is healthy. Knowing there are people out there who want to read my stuff and that it makes them happy is kind of incredible to me.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for waiting. Hopefully chapters should be up every 2-3 days, and be slow on weekends.

It felt good to be back in the red lion again. Keith’s hands roamed over its controls. He punched a few buttons and pulled back the clutch, and the red lion surged forward through the vacuum of space. While Keith may have not been in complete working condition, his lion was. It filled him up with a sense of pride and confidence.

“There’s no room for the red lion in Galra space, Keith.”

Pidge’s words from earlier echoed in his mind and effectively soured his mood. He pushed forward on the controls and the lion responded in turn, slowing down to let the rest of the team catch up. He could feel his lion prickling at the edges of his consciousness. 

Keith wasn’t sure what the red lion was trying to convey, but he felt better knowing that it at least shared his concerns. He pressed the button on the bottom of his helmet, activating his comms. “Alright, Voltron, relay the plan, please.”

There was a bit of scrambling on the comms as people argued over who was going to speak first. “One at a time,” Keith clarified with a huff.

“Intercept the Galra freighter,” started Pidge.

“Destroy the Galra freighter,” corrected Lance smugly. “It’s an unmanned vehicle. Only has people on it when it’s full of cargo.”

“And it’s picking up cargo from this planet now. We don’t want anyone on it,” Keith supplied, recalling the plan from the briefing earlier. He had struggled to sit through it, when the urge to vomit had returned in full force.

“I have visual,” Hunk piped in through the comms. Keith nodded absently in response.

“Hey, Keith?” Hunk inquired after a pause.

“Yeah?” said Keith. He pivoted his lion towards the Yellow Paladin’s. Hunk had gone further south while Pidge and Lance for the most part had flanked him. Now that Keith turned, the lions were mostly in formation.

“You said this ship is unmanned, right?”

“Well, according to Pidge, it should be.”

“Hey!” Pidge butted in. “Don’t blame me for everything. I’m a one-man reconnaissance team out here.”

Keith ignored her. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, take a look for yourself. Stay back, though. Don’t want our cover blown,” said Hunk.

As the red lion caught up to the yellow one, Keith took in the sights. The cargo ship, massive and purple, as expected, was docked just out of atmosphere. The lions approached, shielded by the light of the sun as it rose over the planet.

It would have been normal if the barge hadn’t been lit up like a Christmas tree. While it wasn’t moving, every single window port was blazing with a bright white light. Keith recalled that wasn’t normal for Galra ships. Somewhere along the line during the past week, Kolivan had explained the reason all the lights were off in the underbelly of the Castle of Lions; Galra were primarily nocturnal and didn’t do well in areas with bright light.

Keith had wondered why Kolivan had admitted something like that. After all, flash bangs were a thing readily used against enemies back on Earth--and humans thrived in the sunlight. It crossed his mind that he might be joining Kolivan soon in that department, and he clenched the controls tightly.

Back on the comms, Keith spoke up, “Hang back, Voltron. Princess.”

“Yes?” Allura’s voice could be heard clearly, despite the distance.

“Keep the Castle on the other side of the planet, please. Not quite sure what we’re dealing with here. Give me a reading, Pidge. I want signs of life, anything, stat,” he requested. It was a request, not an order. He didn’t feel ready to be ordering around Team Voltron just yet.

“On it, Keith,” confirmed Pidge. There was a time where all that could be heard through the comms was Pidge furiously clacking on whatever keyboard she had brought with her.

“Negative for life,” she reported. “And...anything else for that matter. Nothing broadcasting--tried jamming it but there was nothing to jam.”

“So...are we good to proceed?” asked Lance, who was already inching the blue lion forward.

“Hold it,” Keith said between his teeth. He could see the blue lion from the viewport of his own, heading towards the barge.

“It’s fine, Keith. Chill out. Pidge said it was empty,” Lance tried to assure him, not making any effort to change the blue lion’s trajectory.

Keith responded with a groan and a, “Hunk, flank Lance.” Grabbing the clutch, the red lion shot forward into the vacuum of space. “Pidge, I want you on my six.”

The green and red lions flew in behind the yellow and blue. The formation was slightly staggered to account maneuverability in case they were ambushed. That tended to happen a lot when the Castle of Lions was constantly pursued by a 10,000 year old spacefaring empire. 

The cargo ship still shone brightly against the inky blackness of space, like a firework finale on the Fourth of July. If the cabin of the red lion hadn’t been as brightly lit as it was, Keith swore it would have hurt his eyes to look at it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the green lion drop out of view.

“Pidge?” called Keith through the comms, pressing the button on the bottom of his helmet. “Don’t lag.”

“I’m not lagging, I just,” Pidge started. There was the distinct sound of button mashing. “Just something’s weird.”

This caused Keith to pivot his lion towards the green one. Pidge had stopped moving, her lion floating gently in space. 

“Please share,” piped Lance, who had also stopped without warning. Hunk had to put all his force into the controls to avoid smashing into the blue lion.

“There’s no one on the ship, but the generator is firing at an unsafe rate. There’s no reason for it. Something’s wrong with the ship, maybe. Maybe that’s why they left it out in space without docking it,” Pidge explained.

“Then we wait. There’s no use going into something blind like this,” said Keith. So much for an exhilarating excursion into space in the red lion. He tried to hide the disappointment in his voice. He pressed a few glowing buttons on his dashboard and the his lion righted itself and launched back towards the Castle of Lions.

A strong force sent Keith nearly flying from the chair. In fact, if it hadn’t been strapped securely in, he was sure he would’ve been a mess on the windscreen. The green lion barrelled into the red one, sending them both spinning into space. 

Keith made a startled ‘Oof!’ noise, and tapped the button on his helmet. “Pidge, what the heck?”

He could almost make out the force of what had hit them, a ripple distorting the very vacuum of space. Like a tarmac on a hot day, it sizzled. Keith grabbed the clutch, only to realize the red lion wasn’t responding.  
“Voltron!” Keith called as the lights in the cabin flickered off. The screen on his helmet shut as pressure, and with it, air, was lost. Through the intense hurdles and spins the red lion was going through, he could make out the now darkened form of the Galra barge--along with the rest of the lions floating (or in Pidge’s case, spinning) through space.

“Voltron, we’ve been hit by an EMP. A big one. Everyone, respond,” he called again. The gyro machinations of the lion’s head had been disabled as well, and now he was beginning to feel sick with the constant spinning of the lion. He thought briefly about unstrapping himself to try and find some source of auxiliary power, but that would only lead to him being bashed about in the pilot’s cabin.

“Respond,” Keith tried one more time. The comms were dead. He couldn’t even hear the static of radio silence; everything was offline. Hopefully Allura and Coran had kept the Castle of Lions at a far enough distance away that they could safely gather up the Paladins. 

His stomach let out an uncomfortable grumble, and he grabbed at his armor. He had just finished his vomiting episodes, and he was definitely not going to have another one while the helmet was securely tightened over his face. He wasn’t Hunk.

The terrible thing about space was the lack of gravity or friction, so when the red lion finally ceased spinning, Keith didn’t know whether to be relieved or concerned.

He decided to be concerned when it got hot in the cabin. He unbuckled himself, the chair having swiveled away from the viewport. He floated up out of his chair, and looked up at the windscreen of the inactive red lion.

He was falling into the atmosphere of the nearby planet. Flames licked at the edge of the viewport. He surmised that the lack of power didn’t affect the heat shields, but rather only the climate control in the cabin. He had fallen through space before, onto that gray craggy planet.

Where he’d rendezvoused with Shiro. Where Shiro had told him to lead Voltron. What a great job he was doing of that right now. Since the red lion was currently falling face first into the planet’s gravitational pull, he couldn’t locate any of the other lions.

Instead, he floated back towards the exit of the cabin, looking for anything that could provide auxiliary power. It was nothing but storage containers--which would have come in useful now. Maybe he could have stored some batteries in there.

Frowning deeply, he tried to touch the panel to open up the cockpit. Nothing happened. He rapped on the door a few times, as though the red lion would hear him and let him through. 

The entire vehicle rumbled as they tumbled through the atmosphere of the planet. Keith pushed off of the wall, launching himself towards his seat. A particularly strong rocking sent him off to the side, hitting his jetpack on the wall of the cabin.

He grunted, and the red lion rocked dangerously again through the sky. He had to get to the chair before the force of gravity flattened him into a pancake on the windscreen. With one more forceful kick he was off the cabin wall, and managed to hang onto the seat by grabbing one of the straps of the harness.

Whiplash jolted through his arm, and wincing through the momentary pain he was able to fix himself back into the seat just as the force of gravity sent his entire body forward. The harness tightened on him and he jerked his head back, feeling a muscle pull in his neck. He wasn’t going to say it wasn’t a frightening experience, but he knew how well Red could take a beating.

He was most worried about the rest of Voltron. Had they been sucked in by the force of gravity too? He hoped none of the other lions would fall onto him. A crash from atmo? Totally fine. Being crushed by another lion built to withstand a crash from atmo? Not exactly sure about the survivability of that one.

The blackness of space faded from view, and was replaced the blue of an oxygen rich atmosphere. It would have been a relief, Keith always did like the nice and open sky, except for the fact that this was a favored planet for Galra cargo pick up. It had been different on the uninhabited planet with Shiro, the only thing they had to worry about there was the terrifying fauna.

Another rough tumble through the atmosphere made Keith’s head spin, and the chair swiveled around in time for Keith to make eye contact with the parched earth of the planet. 

The crash made Keith see stars. He could hear the metal of the red lion crunching beneath the sheer pressure of the impact. Keith immediately lost all control of himself and would have been propelled out of the seat if it hadn’t been for the harness. The windscreen went dark as the red lion buried itself into the dirt.

The lion tumbled endlessly, fueled by the occasional descent down altitude. Keith surmised that they had crashed on a mountain--just his luck. When the movement finally stopped, Keith was suspended in the pilot seat by the harness. The red lion had landed awkwardly, with its faced buried in the ground.

Keith swore he had at some point passed out. It was all he could do to muster the energy to disengage himself from the pilot seat. He landed with a yelp and a thud onto the dashboard, and then tumbled onto the windscreen. Shakily, he pressed his thumb to the bottom of his helmet.  
The visor clicked off. So there was air on this planet. That was a good start.

“V-voltron,” Keith stumbled, his voice rough. There was no audio feedback on the comms. “If you’re out there, please say something.”

There was no response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait. Hope you still enjoy this fic. I was thinking of rewriting some chapters because I don't feel like they're good enough. Let me know what you think!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In today's episode, we venture back a few days into the past. It's a bit graphic.

If Shiro could see him now, Keith hadn’t the slightest idea what he would say.

Kolivan’s quarters were darkly lit, which eased the tensions in Keith’s shoulders. Maybe if he couldn’t see what was happening, he didn’t quite have to acknowledge what was happening.

“So...this is going to hurt?” Keith asked. He had his back to Kolivan, and kept adjusting his jacket to make sure it was on properly. 

There was barely a pause before the Galra replied, “Yes.”

“Where did you even get the stuff?” Keith followed up with after a nervous swallow. 

“You act as though the universe isn’t powered on quintessence. As though our spaceships and technology doesn’t exist because of it.”

“The Castle of Lions is powered on Balmera crystals.”

Kolivan made a noise that Keith could almost peg for a laugh. “You aren’t the Castle of Lions. We don’t need a Balmera crystal to fix you.”

“I don’t need fixing, Kolivan,” Keith replied, his voice losing whatever lightness it had. “I wouldn’t be doing this without a good reason.”

Another indescribable noise. Then the sound of claws on glass followed, which caused Keith to turn. He visibly paled. “That is the biggest needle I’ve ever seen.” 

Kolivan, with one large, clawed finger, was busy mixing whatever was inside the syringe. Clear liquid dribbled down the needle, perhaps the longest and thickest one Keith had ever laid eyes on, and sprayed onto the floor with another flick. With one yellow eye, Kolivan regarded Keith, and then the syringe. “This is just the saline.”

Keith swallowed. He felt like he had a huge lump in his throat. He was no stranger to pain, he had been a Paladin of Voltron for a while. Before that, he had survived in the unforgiving deserts of the American southwest. He felt like he could handle a simple spinal injection no problem.

He had seen epidural steroid injections performed before, if not in a classical setting, like a hospital. More like when he was awake at 2:00AM and the weird and gory side of the Internet beckoned to him. He wished he hadn’t known anything about anything having to do with injections until this point. Ignorance, he had found, was relative bliss.

Keith knew he was going to regret the question he asked next. “Where’s the anesthetic?”  
Kolivan shook his head. “I am willing to do this much for you, not take from the Alteans’ supplies in the medbay. Besides, local anesthetic is an outdated practice. Healing pods are much preferred.” 

“You could’ve just said, ‘there’s no anesthetic’. That would’ve been completely fine,” Keith deadpanned back, his back stiffening at the thought.

“Yes,” Kolivan began, and shot him a coy smile. “I could have indeed. Please, sit.” The Galra pointed to his bed.

With a sigh, Keith made his way over to the bed and sat down on it. While the rooms Kolivan occupied were not Paladin quarters, every living arrangement in the Castle of Lions seemed to be very white and sterile. Even though he must have been billions of miles from Earth, he almost felt like he was in a hospital.

“So, Paladin,” rumbled Kolivan, who was approaching with the first syringe he had prepared. “How do you think you will begin your journey?”

“Pardon?” Keith asked, having only eyes for the needle.

“The Galra Empire is vast. It spans across multitudes of solar systems,” Kolivan explained, motioning with his hands for something specific. When Keith didn’t comply, he paraphrased, “Roll up your shirt, please.”

Keith’s hands ghosted over the bottom of his shirt. Before he rolled it up, he shrugged off his jacket. “I feel like it’s obvious,” answered Keith.

“Not to me,” said Kolivan. “May I?”

Keith nodded. He felt Kolivan’s clawed hands on his back. A rough thumbpad depressed the skin near the small of his back. “If we can’t find him in space, then there’s only one place he could be.”

“Ah, yes,” said Kolivan, who seemed preoccupied. “Our home planet, Gal.”

“Your home planet,” Keith corrected. “I was born on Earth.” As far as he knew. It pained him, how much he didn’t and probably would never know.

“Gal is dwarfed by many of our space stations,” explained Kolivan. There was a clicking noise coming from behind Keith, but when he turned to move his head, Kolivan pushed him back. “Yet it is the most populous of any of our hubs. Skyscrapers so tall, they seem to break atmosphere. Cities so tightly packed, with everyone scrambling to get to the top. A literal dog-eat-dog world. A wondrous urban sprawl, a cacophony of a planet. It would be hard to find anyone.”

“Shiro’s not just anyone,” Keith mused, wishing he could turn around. His back was exposed and at the mercy of the Galra. “And you sound nostalgic.”

Kolivan huffed. “I suppose one wishes and pines for what they are familiar with. I doubt you find yourself at ease in the Castle of Lions.”

“It’s gotten better,” Keith admitted. A dozen images passed through his mind at once. Everyone at the dinner table, the sparring sessions, the long, arduous flights in the red lion, finding out the Castle was a spacefaring ship for the first time. He felt the edges of his lips twitch. “What do you miss, Kolivan?”

There was silence behind him for a long time. “My comrades. Those who have fallen, those who have been lost in the endless expanse of our universe. Those trapped under the tyranny of Zarkon’s rule... Our triple sunrise.”

As Keith wondered about the implications of a three-star system, he felt the needle plunge into his back. He yelped and stifled a scream. While it wasn’t exactly painful, the sensation of fluid flushing through his lower back was extremely uncomfortable. When he began to squirm, Kolivan put an arm around him, effectively placing him in a chokehold.

His heartbeat began to pick up as he felt Kolivan depress the plunger. He made a few whimpery noises which he knew the Galra would hang over his head until he died. Surprisingly, Kolivan made a small noise that didn’t sound entirely unlike a gentle hushing. 

When Kolivan released him, Keith’s heart was hammering. He clambered further onto the bed, his heart like a jackhammer in his chest. “Warning...please,” Keith managed, clutching his back with an arm. The Galra looked unmoved, those unblinking yellow eyes boring into his own. 

Kolivan stood and turned back to the desk where he had been assembling and preparing the saline solution. “I will try to make this dose as potent as possible. You may only need one injection to complete the process. I will monitor you closely.”

“And if I only have one and I need more?” Keith asked between heavy breaths.

Kolivan cocked his head in thought and didn’t stop messing with whatever was on his desk. “You could split down the middle like a chimera cat.”

The Red Paladin less than successfully suppressed a shudder. 

Kolivan returned with a similar looking syringe. What was inside was like liquid gold, and lazily lapped at its glass confines. “I have been instructed to provide you ample warning this time. You will most likely feel intense pain where I have injected the saline.”

Keith shot the Galra a look. Kolivan’s bright eyes and the quintessence were the only things that really stood out in the dimly lit room. The needle of the syringe was tinted gold with the shine of its contents.

“Kolivan,” Keith began nervously. He found that he was shaking.

The hulking Galra stopped his movements, one ear twitching in acknowledgement. He had one finger on the plunger, the other holding the syringe delicately. “Yes, Paladin?” he rumbled.

“Is it...is the procedure reversible?” Keith asked, his voice quivering.

Kolivan sighed, retracting the syringe. “If you are deliberating with yourself at this stage, you are not ready for it.”

Keith’s hand shot out, grabbing Kolivan by the arm. The action took the Galra by surprise, and Keith was met with a face full of sharp teeth. The Red Paladin winced. “No, please. I need it. I need to do this. Just give me a plain answer, for once.”

Those yellow eyes narrowed. “I think you know the answer, Paladin.”

Keith released Kolivan’s bicep and the Galra retracted. Seemingly acting on autopilot, Keith rolled his shirt up again and turned away from him. “Do it.”

Kolivan seized him again, pressing the tip of the syringe to his back. He could feel the sting of the needle as it entered him. “Please, Paladin. Try not to scream. As it would end poorly for both of us were this to be discovered, I feel that I would receive the short end of the stick.”

Keith craned his neck just in time to see the golden contents of the syringe disappear into him.

At first, Keith felt nothing.

Then, a pleasant warm feeling. His fingers felt as though he’d slept on them. His head was light, and it was hard to breathe.

And then he was on fire.

He arched his back, his arms splaying out wide in front of him. It was difficult to wriggle free with Kolivan holding him tightly, and he began to fight back. Every inch of him felt as though it was burning. He began to shriek, which awarded him a large purple hand over his mouth.

His movements were spastic, his fingers curled into claws and his neck was so sharply bent it felt like he was going to snap in half. His body was a livewire, everything was too much at once. 

The only thought he could formulate was just one word: No.

His own voice was amplified thousandfold in his own head. That word. No. No, no, no, no, no. Every inch of him felt as though it was being reassembled and replaced in the wrong order, backwards, forwards. He couldn’t discern anything, just the burning that tore through him like a wildfire through a dry brush.

He could feel his muscles straining under the pressure, straining under the weight of Kolivan, who seemed hardpressed to keep Keith silent. He felt fingers on his neck as his screams were choked out of him. He couldn’t tell if it was Kolivan’s doing, or if he was choking himself. He could no longer feel his arms, only the fire.

His vision flickered in hues of red and gold, and then black. And everything was gone.

He awoke with a start, his memories returning to him hazily. When he mustered the strength to examine his surroundings, he found that he was no longer where he had been when he passed out. 

The ground was red beneath him, an earthy and cracked maroon. He stumbled to his feet, feeling no worse for wear than before he had visited Kolivan.

Kolivan? Where was he?

“Kolivan?!” Keith cried out. His voice echoed for miles into a gray sky. The endless expanse of red plain sprawled before him. Mist clouded the corners of his vision. When he moved, he seemed light. Or lighter than he had been.

Rain began to fall from that same gray sky. First a few droplets, which Keith didn’t particularly mind. He tilted his face upwards, feeling the cold rain against his skin.

Then it poured. Keith received a faceful of freezing water which made him shake. He tumbled through the once-desert, the red earth now churning and turning into mud under his feet. It looked like blood.

The mud never let up. Puddles of water formed in between the crevices, turning into slush, and Keith found himself struggling to keep upright. He stopped and slumped into the mud, red up to his knees.

He looked up, brushing his matted and wet hair out of his eyes with a gloved hand.

There was a figure at the edge of his vision. If it had been raining any harder, he would have missed it. 

“Kolivan?” Keith yelled, calling out to the shape in the distance.

It moved closer.

Keith asked again, but there was no response. The Red Paladin tried to get to his feet, but found himself stuck in the mud. When he tried to move, he fell waist deep into the blood red earth.

The figure looked too small to be Kolivan, but was still a robust. Everything was happening slowly. He knew who it was.

Keith sucked in a breath. “Shiro?”

The form at the edge of his vision stopped, but there was no mistaking that white tuft of hair. Keith’s heart hammered in his chest.

“Shiro!” Keith exclaimed, raising his hands out of the mud. He must have looked a mess. This was not the way he imagined them being reunited.

“Shiro! It’s me! It’s Keith!” he tried again, trying his best to move out of the damned mud. Shiro, on the other hand, seemed to have no issue gliding above it like it was the shallowest water.

Shiro was here. Keith felt like crying. He had missed him so much. “Shiro…” Keith could only say, wiping tears from his eyes. His gloved hands came away gold with quintessence.

Shiro looked just as he had when he had left. Donned in the armor of the Black Paladin, he starkly contrasted the bleak and barren landscape behind him. He towered above Keith, wearing the deepest frown on his face. When had Shiro gotten directly front of him?

Keith’s stomach dropped. “Shiro?” he whispered, feeling something was not quite right. He watched Shiro’s face contort from concern to pure and unbridled rage. He felt as though he had swallowed a lead weight.

Shiro grabbed Keith by the collar of his jacket, drawing him up to face height. The Red Paladin yelped, kicking out. The mud made a revolting suction noise as he was lifted from it. “Shiro, w-what are you doing?”

The Black Paladin adjusted his grip on Keith, so he was only holding him with one arm. His Galra tech fingers were cinched firmly around his neck, and Keith felt the air leaving him. “S-s--” was all he managed to get out before Shiro crushed his windpipe. Keith felt the bones crunch and when he screamed there was no sound. 

Shiro dropped Keith, and he fell limply to his knees. He wasn’t sure how he was still looking at Shiro with his neck crushed, but he was. Desperate to speak, he let out a wheeze that sounded like a death rattle. Gently, Shiro bent down and looked at him dead in the eye.

In the reflection of Shiro’s wet and metallic armor, Keith could see his reflection. A shocked purple face stared back at him, complete with those ghostly yellow eyes. His neck was a mess of bloody pulp, and his hands, tipped with sharp claws, quivered as he placed them protectively over what was left of his neck.

The Black Paladin leaned in close, effectively cutting Keith off from gaping at his own visage. As Shiro did so, he placed both hands gently around Keith’s neck, over his own. Those human hands shook with calculated fury.

“You’re not Keith,” whispered Shiro, smiling into one of Keith’s large Galra ears. Keith could feel them fold back in fear.

In one swift motion, Shiro cracked Keith’s neck to the side, and his world stopped.

Keith awoke with a scream. His hands flew to his neck, feeling around for the gory mess that Shiro had made. Strangled sobs tore from his throat, making it feel raw and messy. Tears streamed down his face, through eyelids forced shut in fear.

Keith felt the trickle of the quintessence, the heat of it all rush down his back like a waterfall. He tossed and turned, apparently at some point having been put in a bed. He managed to pry his hands off of his own neck and grabbed the nearest thing to him, the pillow, and held it close. 

He stifled his sobs by pressing his face into the pillow, effectively drying off his face. He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, just crying into the bed like a child. It could have been minutes, hours, or even days.

When he came to, or rather, when he felt ready to face himself again, he took in his surroundings. He was still in Kolivan’s quarters, but Kolivan wasn’t there. Feeling shaky, he kicked his feet out over the bed and stood up. His spine immediately flared to life, and he fought not to yelp in surprise.

He clambered over to a mirror, to get a look at what he had become. He placed one hand on the mirror to balance himself.

What met him in the mirror was a completely human, if not devastated looking Keith, whose hair was matted with sweat. He sighed in relief, but it was bittersweet. He had signed himself away to an uncertain fate.

He was Galra. He saw it in his dream.

Even if he did find Shiro, things would never be the same. How had he not factored this, possibly the most crucial thing, into the equation? He had been so preoccupied with saving Shiro that he hadn’t bothered to consider that Shiro would be being saved by a Galra.

His captors. His torturers. His mutilators. 

There was nothing he could do if Shiro decided to strike him down on sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I liked writing this chapter a lot. As always, thoughts, concerns, and questions are all welcome and very much appreciated.
> 
> A lot of people have left wonderful things in the comments section, and they really touch me. I feel as though I should reply to them, but I am very shy and unsure how to proceed unless I message en masse. But regardless, know at least that I read them and love them.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not dead!

The red lion was out of commission. It seemed like it would be for a while. 

When the wormhole incident had happened, both the black and red lions had made a fantastic recovery. However, that damage had been for the most part external. Even when the lions had been hit by a blast of quintessence during the last fight with Zarkon, they had made a miraculous rebound and managed to take the Emperor out of commission. 

This time, there was no quick bounce back. At least not on the part of the red lion. Keith had managed to remain conscious despite the arduous crash down onto the planet. The trip through atmosphere had been rough, but he had endured. 

He was on his stomach on the dashboard of the dead lion. They had landed awkwardly, on both a slope and an angle, so getting to the door to make an egress had proven difficult thus far. When he rolled over onto his back, it pressed against the glass of the windscreen. 

“Voltron,” he sighed into the dead comm, one last time. There was not even a crackle. 

“Okay, Keith,” he mumbled to himself, folding his arms over his chest. “Let’s think about this.”

Alien planet? Check. Potentially hostile? Check, and more than likely. This was a Galra shipping port, for crying out loud. Aroused suspicion upon entry of atmosphere? Absolutely. Keith surmised he didn’t have a lot of time. The electromagnetic pulse that the barge had emitted had been so strong there was no way that it wasn’t a coordinated effort on part of the planetside Galra.

He managed to get himself to his knees shakily. He was weary about cracking the glass of the red lion’s windscreen, but then he remembered that it hadn’t shattered while crashing through a goddamn atmosphere--his feet wouldn’t do a number on it.

Keith stood briefly, gathered his thoughts, and leaped towards the pilot’s seat. He managed to snag a hand on the headrest and hoisted himself up so that he was squatting on the back of the chair. This all would have been so much easier if the red lion had landed in an upright position.

Reaching for the door was an entirely different matter. He stood uneasily on the back of the chair, and reached for the sliding door. He hadn’t the slightest idea how he was going to open it. Ultimately, he brought forth his bayard and called it into its sword form.

He jammed the blade of the sword through the sliding doors and winced. He felt bad that he had to do this to the red lion, but it was unfortunately necessary that he abandon the vessel for now, lest the Galra find him and corner him in here like a mouse.

When he twisted the sword to the side, the doors came apart easily. With a shudder and a hiss, the automatic mechanisms forced the two doors to the side, moving themselves out of Keith’s way. He tried to suppress a smile--the situation was far too grievous for something like that.

Eventually, Keith managed to clamber out of an emergency exit hatch that he hadn’t known previously existed. It had taken quite a bit of maneuvering in order for him to find his way out of the labyrinthine vessel that was the red lion. He prided himself on his familiarization of the craft, being its Paladin, but when everything was askew and at an angle, he found himself woefully unfamiliar with his surroundings. 

As he scrabbled at the smooth metal sides of the red lion on his way out, he wondered where the rest of Team Voltron had ended up. When the red and green lions had collided, Pidge had been sent spinning the other way. He couldn’t even remember if he had seen the blue and yellow lions on his descent down to the earth. He clenched his fists, frustrated.

No use dwelling on what happened. Keith needed to focus in the now. Half shaking himself out of his daze, he surveyed his surroundings. Not nearly as bad as the planet that he and Shiro had landed on, this planet was fairly rocky. Big outcrops of stone peaked out over the horizon, and Keith surmised the red lion had landed on one of them.

The lion itself had been fairly obscured, buried beneath the landslide that Keith had caused as he crashed his craft through the atmosphere and onto the ground. The head of the lion was lost underneath a sea of churned up earth, and the only pieces of the lion that were exposed were the shoulder and a little bit of the tail.

Surely his reception would be better outside of the lion. He pressed his hand to the bottom of his helmet. “Voltron?” he asked, his own voice echoing over the dusty crags of the planet. He pressed his hands to his helmet, as though he could better pick up on the comms that way--he heard something, not just the dead silence of a mostly uninhabited planet. A whirring noise of sorts.

“Voltron! Come in, this is Keith,” he spoke into his helmet, cocking his head to the side. The whirring got louder. That was peculiar--that wasn’t a noise that the communications technology usually made.

Keith dove to the side as a photon beam took his place where he had been moments before. He called his bayard, and in a flash of light the sword took form in his hand. The shield flickered to life on his opposing arm, and it absorbed two more blasts of purple energy.

The force knocked Keith off of his feet. His armor clattered against the metal of the red lion. He craned his neck upwards, looking at his assailant.

On a cruiser that reminded Keith too much of the one he had back on Earth, a Galra soldier sat. Their laser rifle smoked in one hand, the other gripped firmly on the handlebars.

“Not Voltron, unfortunately,” said the soldier, whose visored helmet retracted so she could blow the smoke from her rifle. The Galra leaped off of her cruiser, landing on the shoulder of the red lion with a satisfying thud. “How serendipitous for us, however, that you decided to grace our quiet planet with your presence, Paladin.”

The Galra towered over Keith, but that didn’t stop him from getting to his feet. He held out his sword in front of him, letting his wrist go slack but his shoulder and elbow ramrod straight.

The armor that Keith’s opponent was wearing seemed to be standard issue. It wasn’t the light steel that covered all of the Galra robots like a skin, but some dark purple metal with glowing red and yellow inlay. Just another Galra soldier. Keith could handle her. The laser rifle cradled in the crook of her arm began to whirr to life again.

“I will give you a chance to put down your weapon,” said the Galra, taking aim at Keith. “But after that, I cannot promise I will play nice.”

Keith responded by running at her, deftly dodging the following blast from her laser rifle. It temporarily blinded him, and he swung blindly. His blade met one armored forearm, and the Galra soldier followed up with a swift sucker punch to Keith’s jaw.

His helmet rattled as he was knocked to the ground once more. His chin blossomed with red hot pain. With a swift grunt he managed to get himself to his feet, narrowly getting singed to smithereens by another blast from the Galra’s gun.

Feigning an attack with his sword, he delivered to her a punch in return, which blew her helmet clean off. She cried out, but otherwise didn’t waste time in delivering a follow up blow, a swift kick to the chest.

Keith brought up his shield to absorb the hit. Her leg deflected off of its force field, and he pushed her to the side with it. She stumbled briefly before regaining her stance.

He could see the Galra clearly now. She was lighter in color in a way that reminded him of Ulaz. She had a head of white hair and bald, bat-like ears that were folded back in frustration. Her narrow, yellow eyes were seemingly unseeing, but when she cocked her head and snarled at Keith, he immediately thought otherwise.

“Where are your friends, Paladin?” she sneered, dropping her gun. From her belt she unsheathed two daggers. Her sharp, pointed teeth flashed dangerously in the sunlight. “Did they leave you all alone?”

His bayard bounced off of her daggers, creating a shower of sparks. He rolled backwards out of the way of her flurry of blows. Her arms were long, and she had the advantage where height was concerned.

One, then two, and finally three more hits was all Keith had in him before he needed to catch his breath. Whenever he found an opening in her stance, she was always there to compensate with her reach.She was encroaching on his space, and soon enough he had backtracked so much so that her rifle was underneath his feet.

When she ran at him, Keith kicked the rifle into her legs. The Galra went stumbling to the ground with a furious cry. He didn’t expect her to keep fighting when she went down, and when she grabbed his foot with her claws, he tumbled down after her.

A dagger bounced off of his armor as they scuffled on the ground. His bayard clattered to the ground as the Galra clawed at his hand. Physically speaking, she was stronger, and thusly she managed to get to her feet first.

Keith didn’t wholly expect to be taken with her as she rose to her feet, but she picked him up and drove him into the ground with such force that his world shook. All the air left his body, leaving his chest aching and hollow.

As he desperately sucked in air, the Galra chuckled and scoffed. “Humans. Don’t know what the Emperor sees in them.”

She delivered a kick to his helmet that shattered his visor. Her armored made full contact with his mouth, and he felt a few teeth dislodge and come loose. He made a choked sound, half a scream and half a gargle as his mouth welled with blood. All he could taste and smell was iron. Another kick, this time to the stomach, made him feel like he was going to vomit his guts all over again.

Through the broken visor, and through unshed tears, he could see the Galra picking up her own helmet. She placed it back onto her head, her ears folding delicately as she did so.

Keith tried to breathe and return some of the air that his lungs had lost, but he found himself choking on his own blood. He turned over on his side, spitting out a shard of glass and, much to his dismay, two broken teeth.

“Yes, the red lion has been intercepted. Sending the coordinates now,” Keith could hear the soldier say through her comms.

Keith absently put his shaking fingers to his helmet, pressing the communications button. The channel was quiet, but he could hear the static of a live connection. A connection meant that the rest of the team could locate him, or his lion.

He looked around. His bayard was across on the other side of the red lion’s shoulder. He reached uneasily to the back of his armor, unsheathing his blade of Marmora. He shoved it under his stomach, waiting for the soldier to approach.

“What? The Paladin? Dealt with. Hm? No, sir, he’s still alive, sir. I can deliver him, sir,” she stammered through her comms, a bit uneasily. Keith surmised whoever was on the other end wasn’t someone to take lightly.

She turned on one heavily armored heel towards Keith, one dagger in hand, the other having been lost in the scuffle. Her teeth glinted in the light.

“You look so young, for an alien,” she commented, grabbing him by the rim of his armor. “What cruel twist of fate led a child to be the Red Paladin of Voltron? To go through such pain, here on his lonely planet?”

As she tugged him upwards, Keith willed the blade of Marmora to awaken. He slashed at her armor, and it cut through her chest plate like it was butter. She shrieked. Whether it was in fury or surprise, Keith wasn’t sure.

However, the Red Paladin wasted no time in finding out. He was on her again, slashing carelessly now that he finally had an opening. Adrenaline pumped through his veins, and his arms were out of his control as he cut and hacked his way into the Galra soldier, discarding his sword by the wayside in favor of using his hands.

It was only when armor stopped being armor and turned into a reddish pulp that Keith terminated his onslaught. He breathed heavily through his mouth, the pain of his smashed teeth dulled now thanks to the thrill of battle. The Galra soldier didn’t move under him--at some point he had smashed her into the ground like she had him. It felt like justice.

He tilted his head up to the sky and let out a low growl. He felt the blood trickle out of his mouth. It pumped lively in his ear drums. His hands were shaking and he looked at his blade of Marmora on the ground. It had reverted to its dagger form at some point, and he bent and placed it carefully into its sheathe on his lower back.

He then brought up his hands, which were trembling profusely. Broken through the gloves were the tips of his claws, purple and sharp and red with blood. He put a hand over his face--the sun hurt his eyes. Pieces of the visor fell to the ground and broke into irrecoverable shards.

When reinforcements came, he didn’t have the energy to fight them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about that. There were some unforeseen circumstances that popped up. Hope y'all are still reading, if you still want to, because things are going to heat up pretty soon. Hopefully updating will return to a slightly more normal schedule.


	8. Chapter 8

Through the dark hallways the Galra took Keith. He remembered being hoisted onto the back of a cruiser, other soldiers gawking at the remains of their fallen comrade. Echoed through the halls was the cacophony of sound and noise, half congratulatory for retrieving the Paladin, half lamenting the loss of a soldier, whose name Keith learned was Prise.

A good a soldier as any of them, many of the Galra had said as they traveled through those endless hallways. While some seemed disappointed, no one mourned. Clearly the sight of the regiment dragging the Red Paladin through the hallways had overshadowed the loss of Prise.

Kolivan’s words echoed in Keith’s head.

“Unlike Zarkon’s...ideology, if you could call it that, I believe every life is worth something.”

Did these Galra even care that he had killed Prise? Would he face heinous retribution? Or was she just one of many people who had sacrificed themselves for Zarkon’s empire? Keith swallowed uncomfortably, remembering the way the red lion’s blade cut through a Galra warship like it was butter. At the time, he felt as though he was just in his actions. At the mercy of the Galra, he thought otherwise.

Neon purple lights lined the dark walkway towards a large metal door. The soldiers who flanked Keith stopped as it shuddered and opened with a hiss. They tentatively nudged him forward, the metal of his bindings clinking as they all collectively moved forward.

Keith nervously regarded his hands, which were bound in front of him. Blood flaked off the claws that had pierced through his gloves. He turned his hand slightly, as much as he could manage, examining himself in reluctant disbelief.

The Galra soldiers led Keith into what appeared to be a control room--with people buzzing to and from consoles, frantically typing on their keyboards. When the guards entered in with Keith, the room seemed to freeze.

A questionable decision, thought Keith as he took in his surroundings, to bring him to their center of operations. The windows were tinted, but he could make out the outlines of the rocky planet that he had crashed onto. He wondered how far away he was from the red lion.

Someone cleared their throat, and Keith focused his attention on the dais in front of him. In the center of the headquarters there sat a broad-chested Galra, both legs firmly planted on the ground. One clawed hand was resting on a panel, a virtual graphic before them casting an eerie red shadow over their form. A thumb pad swept over the screen, and it dissipated in a fizzle of electricity. 

The Galra looked haggard, maybe even tired. A flat, nearly reptilian nose with only slits for nostrils flared as he took in Keith’s visage. A tapered and furred ear flicked. Everyone in the room was quiet.

“Commander Cyrin,” began the Galra to Keith’s right, his voice trembling. “We retrieved the Red Paladin from Sector Omicron.” The soldier pushed Keith forward, causing him to stumble. “And he--” 

“--And the lion?” cut in Cyrin, claws tapping audibly on the panel. Yellow eyes met Keith’s, and the Red Paladin stood tall, his nose upturned. The Galra commander’s lip curled, one tooth glinting in the light of the many monitors in the room.

“W-we’re sending a barge, with a tractor beam, sir,” said the Galra to Keith’s left. The two soldiers exchanged nervous looks, and the one who had been originally speaking decided to continue. “He had this on his person, sir.”

Moving away from Keith and the other soldier, the Galra to his right moved towards the commander on the dais. From his belt he retrieved the Marmora dagger. The symbol of the Marmora glowed bright blue in the darkness. 

Keith’s eyes widened, and he wrenched himself over so that he could look back at himself. When had they removed the dagger from his belt? Hadn’t he sheathed it? Keith could feel himself frown, and an unfamiliar feeling bubble up in his throat.

Commander Cyrin beckoned the soldier forward. He offloaded the dagger onto his commanding officer, who held it tentatively in the hand that wasn’t on the panel. He twirled it once in his hand, slashing it experimentally. Keith could feel himself bristling. 

“Give it back,” Keith barked hoarsely. Through the blood and broken teeth, his words were butchered and inelegant. But he was loud, and the Galra working at the computers seemed to cower. They all exchanged looks, and risked a glance at Cyrin.

“No,” said the Commander calmly, twisting the blade in his hand. A purple claw tapped on the shining blade. “I want this destroyed. Perhaps I’ll melt it into something less blasphemous.”

Keith took a step towards Cyrin, but a swift elbow to his ribs from the left guard stopped his approach. The guard to his right grabbed his hair, dragging him back towards them both. Keith felt as though his hair was going to be yanked right out of his skull with the amount of force the Galra put into it. 

Yellow eyes on Keith, he continued. “I would want the Paladin destroyed too, but we have three lions unaccounted for. They will look for him--they’re already down one. Take him to the holding cell, salvage the armor if you can. I don’t want to see him again.”

The soldiers hustled Keith down a multitude of hallways after that. He lost count at turn number four, the pain of this shattered teeth returning in a wave of throbbing aches. He winced, bowing his head. He would have looked for a quick egress, but he found himself without the energy to do so. Everything was so hard. Lifting his head felt like lifting a lead weight. 

They stripped him of his armor at some point, getting him down to his flight suit. He shuddered at the change in temperature and went to grab his shoulders, only his hands were bound. A shiver went down his spine, and a ghost of the pain of the injection caused him to twitch involuntarily. 

The cell door in front of him opened, and the guards pushed him in. Darkness enveloped him. The silence was so crushing, it was almost tangible. The door shut with a clang made Keith’s aching teeth chatter.

He took two steps into the cell before rebounding towards the door, smashing his fists on the bars. He wrapped both hands around them and rattled, and screamed. There were no words, but just an endless stream of noise bubbled up from inside of him.

His chest heaved heavily in tandem with his fists. What good were the claws if they couldn’t file their way through the bars? When he swallowed, his throat was raw from screaming. His fingers found their way to his neck, where his claws ghosted over his Adam’s apple. 

There was no telling whether or not the coordinates of the red lion had been received by the rest of the Paladins. The lion was the most important thing--they had to retrieve it before the Galra did. As long as they had all five lions, they would be able to form Voltron. Pilots or not, the lions were the key to destroying Zarkon. 

Keith was secondary. He could rot in this cell for an eternity, as long as the red lion was safely secured. But why did it hurt so much, saying that to himself? He held his claws out in front of him. They had removed his gloves, so Keith could make out the purple snaking its way up his hands, wispy tendrils finding their way to his wrists. 

He wouldn’t even begin to know what to say if the Paladins saw him like his. Well, to Pidge he would, but not to anyone else. Lance might tease him, would most definitely tease him. Hunk was his friend no matter what. 

It was his decision to abandon them--to purposefully do this to himself that would sting. Especially Allura. She had barely accepted the fact that he was Galra, and here he was, consciously transmogrifying himself into a monster, just having gored to death a soldier named Prise, who would rot forgotten on this dismal rocky planet, and it was all his fault. Maybe if he was never found, that would be better. The best he could hope for was that the red lion awoke and rescued him, and when that happened he would leave for good.

His hands began to shake, and he balled them up into fists. His claws dug into the soft flesh of his palms. Pinpricks of blood bubbled underneath in the indentations that his nails were leaving.

“Are you here to kill me?”

The voice startled Keith to such a degree that he felt he would have jumped out of his skin if he could. He turned back towards the cell, but all he could see was the darkness. The only illumination in the room came from the sickly neon lights in the hallway.

“What?” Keith managed. He winced. That was definitely what someone who expected to be murdered wanted to hear. “No. I’m not--what? Who...where are you?”

“Stop looking at the light. That might help,” offered the voice. It was masculine and gruff.

Keith narrowed his eyes, but did as he was told. He stepped away from the bars of the prison and into the darkness. It took a few moments, but once he did so he could make out the form of someone sitting to the side of the the center of the cell.

“I’m...not here to kill you,” whispered Keith, his heart still beating fast from the surprise. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

The figure barked out a laugh. There was the sound of something metal moving--Keith surmised it was chains of some sort. “You didn’t scare me. I smell the blood, so I thought you were here to kill me.”

“That’s just me,” explained Keith, ignoring how much his mouth hurt when he spoke. He held up his hands, palms upturned. Blood dribbled out of the pinpricks on his palms. “Uh. I’m just frustrated.”

“I would be too, if I were you,” said the prisoner. It sounded like he was smiling. “But no. Not that blood. Not yours.”

Keith stomach dropped. He inspected his claws in the dark as best he could. The blood was still there, dried and flaking. “That would be, uh, Prise.”

“Corporal Prise?” asked the prisoner. Keith could only shrug noncommittally. He wasn’t entirely sure who he had killed, he just knew her death was on his conscience. The prisoner seemed to think about this for a moment. “Well, you did what you had to do.”

“That’s not how I see it,” Keith disagreed. When the prisoner didn’t say anything else, he continued on. “It was...I’m not used to it.”

“Why’s that? Haven’t you killed before?”

“Not like this.”

The prisoner hummed, and with the sound of rattling chains got to his feet. Keith could make out the faintest outline of fluffy ears in the dim light. “It’s all the same, really, when you think about it.”

Keith didn’t say anything, but unconsciously took a few steps back. The prisoner seemed to take note of his and laughed. 

“Just because someone has a name and a face when you kill them, it doesn’t make it any different. Don’t feel bad about Corporal Prise. If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else, yeah?”

“I’m not following,” Keith admitted. There was a heavy sigh and another rattle of chains.

“It’s a soldier’s job, guy. Also, speaking of, if you’re not here to kill me, who are you and why are you here?” the prisoner asked.

“Uh,” Keith thought aloud. He was confused by the general casualness of his fellow captive. Who was he, to this prisoner? Should he announce himself as the Red Paladin? He noted the cat-like ears the prisoner had. Was he a Galra? Would he rejoice, or would he fight back?

“I’m Keith,” he supplied lamely at last. He was tired of speaking, his teeth hurt too much. “And they put me in this cell.”

The prisoner snorted. Did he think his name was funny? “Well, I guess we have something in common, then. My name’s not Keith, but uh, we’re both in this cell. You can call me Tharak. I’m the director of the engineering division here at Sector Alpha. Or ex-director, now, I guess.”

“What did you do to become ex-director, Tharak?” asked Keith, half-amused, but honestly intrigued, making his way towards the door of the cell again. His purple fingers wrapped themselves around the bars.

“I tried to disable an EMP. Well, not ‘an EMP’, the EMP, you know? The one that we shot down the lions with,” Tharak chuckled nervously. His voice trembled at the end of his sentence, as though he thought he shouldn’t have said what he did.

“The EMP? As in, electromagnetic pulse?” Keith whipped around so fast that he could see the silhouette of Tharak jump in surprise. He was almost certain that the ex-director cowered. “You were trying to help Voltron? Do you know where the other lions are?”

“They scattered. I know the red lion is on this planet. The rest? I think they were trapped in orbit. Recoverable by the Castle of Lions.” Tharak paused. The air felt heavy. “Yes. I was trying to help Voltron. Are you going to kill me now?”

“I have a better idea,” said Keith. He was taking a chance here, but he didn’t have any other options. He didn’t know the layout of this Galra base, he but he assumed that this Tharak character would. 

A second wind hit Keith. His hands shook with anticipation. From his view on the inside of the bars, he couldn’t see a single soldier. “Let’s get out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lament the fact that VLD doesn't have enough characters for me to fuel my plot, but I won't stick with original characters for very long--I know how much they bother some readers, and Voltron's current characters deserve some very much needed exposition. Thanks for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's aliiive!
> 
> A few things: I decided to make this chapter huge since it's been a while since I updated. I also changed the description of the fic to reflect what's happening and give more of a sense of the plot. Using a quote from the first chapter for a description is cool and all, but no longer depicts the whole scope of the adventure we're embarking on.
> 
> Enjoy!

Pidge grabbed the green lion’s clutch and pushed with all her might, and it shot out of the hanger like a cork from a champagne bottle.

A few button presses later and the robotic feline was careening its way through the atmosphere of the nearby planet, flanked by the yellow and blue lions. Flame licked at the windscreen and the cockpit rocked with the residual force.

“Uh, Pidge, shouldn’t we have consulted Allura about this before we left?” Hunk asked from the comms. Pidge could see the yellow lion from the side of the viewport.

“Sure thing, Hunk, because we have so much time to waste before we rescue Keith,” she bit back sharply. Hunk made a noise that sounded like it was accompanied with a hearty shrug.

“To be fair, he’s probably already busting himself out,” piped Lance rather matter-of-factly, who spun the blue lion around flashily, and way too close for Pidge’s comfort. She responded by rocketing out ahead of the both of them.

The electromagnetic pulse had cut the power to the red and green lions just as Pidge was turning back towards the Castle. They had slammed into each other full force. While Pidge’s lion had careened back towards the Galra barge, the red lion had tumbled into the gravitational pull of the planet beneath them. 

Both the yellow and blue lions had simply stopped dead in space, floating hunks of metal without means to move. Luckily, the Castle of Lions had been out of range of the electromagnetic pulse. One arduous rescue mission later, the lions had been successfully recovered from the vacuum of space.

Now they were out again, on the way to rescue Keith, who was presumably still stranded in an inactive lion. Pidge palmed the green lion’s controls nervously. Keith hadn’t been in the best of conditions or mental states, and there was no telling what he had gotten himself into at this point. He had crash landed on the planet roughly six hours ago. 

After breaking atmosphere, a vast craggy landscape revealed itself to Pidge. The sun of this system, a giant star near the end of its life, was just about to set, bathing everything in a blood red light. 

With a deft swipe on the viewport, a map of the surrounded area appeared before her. A red blip on the blue screen indicated the last known location of the red lion. 

Pidge set the green lion into a steady decline towards the earth, careful to avoid the spires of rock that jutted out from the earth. Long shadows were cast across the world thanks to the fading light, and soon enough it was hard to see. On the map to the side, three purple dots came into view, glowing maliciously.

“Evasive maneuvers, stat!” called Lance as he dove quickly to the side. The blue lion flickered out of vision as it barreled quickly out of the way of oncoming fire. Without even looking, Pidge followed suit and banked to the left.

A rain of bright purple lasers shone brightly through the side of the green lion’s viewport. Luckily, they had gone wide and had missed by a mile. Pidge, with her green lion being slightly more agile, was able to turn more quickly than her yellow and blue counterparts.

Effectively gunning the engine, Pidge pushed the green lion forward towards a Galra cruiser. While the weapons aboard Galra ships, even the small ones, were formidable, they were no match for the green lion’s ability to weave through their fire.

The jaw of the green lion opened and hungrily snapped up a cruiser. The teeth sliced through the metal like it was butter. It hadn’t even had the time to fire a second shot before it was bits of shrapnel in the lion’s massive maw. Pidge smirked, obviously pleased. If this was the best the Galra had to offer on this planet, they’d find Keith in no time.

The yellow lion had run aground when avoiding the shots. It moved upright and shook off the dirt and debris. It bounded back into the air with a running start, barreling in front of a few carefully fired shots that were making its way towards the blue lion. The lasers deflected off of the yellow lion like it was nothing.

The two remaining cruisers focused their fire on the yellow and blue lions, leaving Pidge free to continue her search. As she watched the yellow lion fire a blast of energy towards one of the ships, she rocketed off towards the glowing red dot on her map.

“Rendezvous with me when you’re done,” Pidge said through the comms.

“Hunk, why don’t you go with her? I can handle this alone. It’s child’s play,” replied Lance coolly as the blue lion received a Galra laser to the muzzle. The force of the impact flipped the blue lion over and into the ground below.

“Meet you at the point soon, Pidge,” said Hunk flatly, ramming the yellow lion into one of the cruisers. It spun through the air, crashed into a rocky spire that jutted from the crust of the planet, and exploded into one thousand pieces.

The green lion soared through the sky, only coming to a stop when she was above the red blip on her map. Her lion gracefully touched down, carefully mounted on one of the flat outcroppings on the mountain. She could see the red lion buried in the earth. There was no forcefield around it, indicating that its power supply must have still been busted.

Pidge exited her lion, her jetpack firing to life behind her. She dropped onto the exposed portion of the lion, her boots clicking on the metal. Having studied the lions exhaustively, she knew exactly where to look for the emergency exit hatch that all the lions had.

She clambered onto the shoulder of the red lion, her jetpack aiding her ascent. To her surprise, the small compartment had already been busted open. She looked at the hatch, and then towards the main body--or what could be seen of it--of the red lion. Firmly shutting the hatch, she called, “Keith?”

When no one answered, Pidge heaved out a sigh. She jumped down from the shoulder, landing once again on the body of the lion. She walked out towards where the red lion was buried in the dirt, and then stopped when something crunched under her feet that sounded distinctly unlike earth. She reached her gloved hand out and picked up what appeared to be a shard of glass.

Looking beneath her, she discovered she had walked over a pile of the stuff. She surmised to follow a trail, but only discovered that there wasn’t much of a trail to follow. Nary a few feet in front of her was the helmet of the Red Paladin, its visor smashed to pieces.

“Oh, no. Keith,” she whispered, scrambling over to the helmet and picking it up, clearing out bits of broken glass from what was left of the visor. “What happened to you?”

\---

Keith found that his claws were a suitable replacement for his bayard.

The simplest plan that both Keith and Tharak could think of jointly was to goad a guard into the cell. That had proved easier than they had thought. It only had only taken two insults from Tharak for a particularly hot-tempered Galra soldier to barge into the cell, and it had only taken three deftly executed claw-tipped swipes from a handcuffed Keith to knock him out cold.

The real struggle had been getting the keys out of the Galra’s pocket while both of them were handcuffed. Keith found it concerning easily to see in the dark, but that didn’t mean he had the dexterity to search through someone’s pockets while his hands were tied.

Eventually, he had found the key and was able to liberate both himself and Tharak. Keith was quick to exit their cell, but Tharak was a bit more hesitant. What came out of the cell was a little different than what Keith was expecting, having only really encountered Galra soldiers before.

The ex-director of the engineering division was fairly short, for a Galra. He was only taller than Keith by about a head, and had an enormous mop of fluffy purple hair. His ears were huge and nearly hairless, and seemed to twitch at every discernable noise, like he was nervous. He wore circular, yellow-tinted glasses. One lens was cracked to bits, but the other seemed to be holding up well enough. He seemed to be wearing the undersuit of an officer’s uniform.

“Okay,” began Keith as he stepped forward into the hallway, his breath leaving him in a huff. “Where do you think they would put my armor...and my dagger?”

Tharak considered the question, adjusting his glasses over his flat, feline nose. “Well, I would assume the armory. Since, you know, that’s where armor goes.”

Keith shot him a pointed look. “Take me there.”

They slinked down the hallway, carefully avoiding any patrols. Thankfully for them both, Tharak was able to identify where there were security cameras and where there weren’t. The route to the armory seemed direct enough to Keith despite the detours to avoid detection, but the layout of those purple, dimly lit halls were lost on him. 

There was a guard at the entrance to the armory. Normally, Keith would have taken this opportunity to pounce, but he had Tharak in tow, and by the way he nervously skittered around the hallways, he wasn’t a fighter. Additionally, the laser rifle that the guard was equipped with seemed particularly dangerous, especially considering that Keith might as well have been naked, having been stripped down to his flight suit.

He returned his head from a corner, having strafed around it to get a good look at the armory. Tharak was behind him, crouched a safe distance away.

“Well,” the Galra engineer prompted, making a shooing motion with his hands. “Go on.”

“No. Quiznak, there’s an armed guard over there,” Keith shot back. The Galra’s ears folded back, pressing into his head. “Let’s think of something.”

“We can’t think ourselves out of every situation. Sometimes, what we need is some muscle. You have it, use it,” Tharak insisted, holding his hands out for emphasis.

“I’m not going to run out there and get shot. Then, you’ll have zero muscle, and no way of getting off this stupid rock,” Keith pointed out, his harsh whispers biting through the silence of the hallway. Tharak’s ears seemed to twitch, and Keith suddenly wondered if he was being very loud by Galra standards.

“Okay, okay,” Tharak gave in, his whispers much lower than Keith’s. He stood up, adjusting his undersuit. His ears flicked back up to attention, then down, and then up again. 

Keith blinked. Was he psyching himself up?

“If you let me die here, I swear the last thing I do will be to rat you out,” warned Tharak as he cleared his throat. He stepped out into the hallway and into the corridor towards the armory, ears carefully held in what Keith assumed was a ‘neutral’ position. Keith scrambled forward towards the edge of the hall so he could see what was going down.

With an air of confidence Keith hadn’t previously witnessed in him, Tharak strode over to the guard standing at attention in front of the armory doors. He performed a quick Galra salute, and the guard responded curtly.

“Vrepit sa,” said Tharak calmly. The guard lowered his rifle, but didn’t move. After a few brief, and in Keith’s opinion, very tense moments, Tharak continued as smoothly as he’d started. “Step aside, please.”

“Name, rank, and purpose, sir,” said the guard, whose hand moved towards the barrel of his rifle.

There was no hesitation on Tharak’s part. He seemed to physically bristle, his thick but short fur puffing out from his person. “I am Lieutenant Commander Ykat, and what do you think it’s for?” he asked harshly, pulling on his undersuit. “Do you think I enjoy wandering Sector Alpha like this?”

The guard seemed to shrink back, especially when Tharak waggled a clawed finger at him. “No, sir, I just--” he began, but Tharak cut him off before he could finish.

“No, I don’t think so. Recruit, yes?” Tharak asked, and cut the guard off again. “What does it take to become a recruit here on a backwater planet like this one, anyway? Not much? Well, it shows. Step aside.” 

The door opened with a hiss, and Tharak pushed past the guard into the armory. Before he completely passed the threshold, he grabbed the guard by the shoulder and pulled the recruit down to his height. “Who’s your CO?”

“Uh, I answer to Sergeant Tar--” the guard started again.

“Good, tell them I’ve relieved you of your guarding duties. Tell them specifically Lieutenant Commander Ykat did so,” Tharak said, tapping a clawed hand on the light-colored chestplate the recruit wore. 

“But, s-sir,” mumbled the guard.

“Get lost, recruit,” ordered Tharak, shoving the guard out towards the hallway. With a weak nod, the guard--or former guard, now--ran down the hallway. Keith pressed himself to the wall, making himself small as possible so he wouldn’t be seen.

When the coast was clear, Keith emerged from the shadows and joined Tharak at the entrance to the armory. With the door wide open, Keith could see rows and rows of standard issue Galra armor, along with some that Keith recalled was for commissioned officers. He surmised it would be pretty simple to find his stark, bright, white and red armor among all the grey, blue, and black.

Halfway through his search into the first rack of armor, Keith turned toward Tharak. “Who’s Lieutenant Commander Ykat?”

Tharak, who was busy outfitting himself in specifically not standard issue armor, looked up. “Who? Oh. I don’t know.”

Keith regarded him skeptically.

Tharak secured a blue chestpiece, which had two sectioned yellow markings that almost looked like eyes, onto his person. “Oh, what? I wasn’t joking when I said it didn’t take much to be a recruit here. They’re not the best and brightest, but at least it’s not Sector Epsilon.”

Keith decided to leave that alone for awhile. He eventually found his armor, discarded hastily in a pile in the back of the armory. When he donned it, it felt like he was slipping into a second skin. The gauntlets fit snugly over his hands, but the tips of his purple claws poked through the black mesh. 

He wandered over to the nearest armor rack and carefully picked out a pair of gauntlets. Unlike the standard, light grey metal that nearly every Galra soldier suited up in, these gloves were a deep red black with black metal claw tips. As he pulled on the black gauntlets, he felt his heartbeat in his chest.

Now in the armor of the Red Paladin, Keith felt more comfortable exploring the rear of the armory. He walked through rows upon rows of plasma and laser rifles, and he brushed the wall with the claw tips of his new gloves. His wandering hand eventually came to rest on his bayard, which had been with the rest of his armor. Absently, he reached for his dagger, only to find that it wasn’t there.

“Who are you?” Keith heard from the front of the armory, which roused him from his thoughts. He immediately crouched down out of habit.

“An excellent question. Who are you?” was the reply from Tharak, sharp and biting. Keith winced.

“Sergeant Tarvus, sir. I posted a recruit at this armory, he said he was relieved by a Lieutenant Commander Ykat,” said the apparent Sergeant Tarvus. “Is that you?”

Keith crept forward towards the entrance to the armory. From his position, he could make out a fully armored Tharak looking up at a rather perturbed, but angry and scaly Galra. 

“Yes,” said Tharak, standing up a little straighter. His arms were folded behind his back, but besides that, he looked rather confident in his officer’s armor. His ears were straight up and at attention, and his chin was up at the other Galra.

Sergeant Tarvus drew a pistol out of his belt and pointed it between Tharak’s eyes. His ears twitched. “Lieutenant Commander Ykat doesn’t exist,” said Tarvus, cocking the pistol. 

Keith barrelled into Tarvus’ side, sending him sprawling into a rack of recruit armor. The tall Galra fumbled and tried to get his footing, but Keith’s bayard was out before the purple alien could get his hands on his pistol, which had spun out of his grasp and landed near Tharak’s feet.

Keith pointed his sword at Tarvus’ neck. “Where’s my dagger?”

The Galra raised an equivalent of an eyebrow. “What?”

The Red Paladin pressed the tip of his blade into the Galra’s neck. A pinprick of red blood bubbled and dribbled out from the insertion. 

Tarvus smiled, showing rows upon rows of sharp teeth. “Oh, that old thing. I remember now.”

Keith’s blood boiled, and it took all of his willpower not to slash Tarvus’ throat then and there. He said all of his next words through his teeth. “Where. Is. It?”

“I heard Commander Cyrin was going to make something nice out of it. Why don’t you ask him?” Tarvus spat back, cackling. Keith’s grip on his bayard trembled. 

In one quick motion, Keith struck Tarvus with the blunt side of his sword, effectively knocking him out. The sergeant slumped down into a bed of recruit armor. 

Keith swished his sword experimentally from side to side before he recalled it into its bayard form, and was out of the armory in a flash. 

“Wait! Keith!” called Tharak, scrambling to catch up with the Red Paladin. “Where are you going?!”

“Grab a weapon,” ordered Keith, tightly grasping his bayard with such force that his hand shook. “We’re going to get my dagger back.”

\---

“Oh, Quiznak! What if he’s hurt? Or worse?” Hunk wailed through the comms. Pidge’s hand wavered over the button on her helmet, half tempted to silence him.

“C’mon, Hunk. This is Keith we’re talking about here,” Lance chimed in in an attempt to calm the Yellow Paladin. “Remember?”

“Just because he’s Keith doesn’t mean he’s impervious to being shot!” Hunk countered. After a few seconds of dead air, he continued, “I mean, him being Keith probably helps, but still.”

“We get it, Hunk, no one’s infallible,” Pidge said annoyedly. “That’s why we’re rescuing him. We know where he is, probably. It wasn’t hard to find the one Galra base in the immediate vicinity. It’s only been a handful of hours, it’s fine.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Hunk agreed halfheartedly. “So...what are we doing when we, you know, actually get to the base?”

Pidge banked left, and both the blue and yellow lions followed suit. 

“The plan is simple, Hunk. We land the lions a safe distance away, and we go in and wreck shop! It’s always worked before,” Lance proclaimed with confidence. 

“Except when it hasn’t,” Pidge pointed out. No one bothered to reply.

Night had fallen with the time it had taken for the yellow and blue lions to rendezvous with Pidge. The moon bathed the rocky planet in a gentle, white light. Everything seemed peaceful, and all was quiet.

A literal calm before a storm, Pidge considered it. “Land here, guys,” she ordered, and all three lions descended behind a jagged spire of rock. Before they disappeared behind the towering piece of stone, Pidge could make out the bright purple lights on the landing strip of the Galra base.

The storming of the Galra base was, as Lance put it, simple. A few blasts from Hunk’s launcher was all it took to rip the hangar doors from their hinges. Lance followed close behind him, taking pot shots at the scrambling Galra soldiers who fled from the explosion.

Pidge took up the rear, already making a mental map of the base. She retrieved her bayard and it shifted into its weapon form in a flash of bright green light. She held it close to her person while Lance and Hunk cleared the area out.

“Lance,” she called. The Blue Paladin turned, his blaster smoking from the end of the barrel. “Get me to a terminal. Hunk, I want you to have our six. Got it?”

“Loud and clear,” yelled Hunk, who shifted positions with Pidge. A few more shots from his launcher was all it took to have the rest of the Galra vacate the immediate area. 

Lance and Pidge took off through the hangar and up a short flight of stairs into the base proper. A siren began to buzz through the hallway, accompanied by a flashing red light. The corridors seemed to pass with a blur, and soon enough Lance kicked his way through a door, his blaster held out in front of him.

“All clear,” he said to Pidge. She nodded, and dashed through the door towards the terminal. It seemed like a fairly simple control room, for the hangar if nothing else. Luckily, she could fix that. Her hands glided across the first keyboard she could find, pressing all the right buttons.

The siren ceased, and the warning lights all throughout the base stopped flashing. The computer she was working on froze, a scramble of angry Galra lettering ceasing to scroll on the screen. In its stead, a map appeared a few moments later, demarcating where the central control room was, along with other important areas of the base.

Hunk passed through the threshold into the tiny control room, joining Lance and Pidge. Lance greeted him with a curt nod.

“Alright. It looks like we’re in Sector Alpha,” Pidge explained, pointing to the map. She drew her finger to the largest square. “This is the central control room. It’s weird, but there’s no actual prison hold in this base.”

“So, the best bet we have is to storm the central control room, and see if anyone there knows where Keith is,” Lance provided. He cocked his blaster and pulled it close to his chest, a smug smile on his face.

“And then we find Keith, and we get off this rock,” finished Hunk. Pidge turned back and smiled at the both of them.

“Let’s do it, Voltron,” said Pidge, breaking out into a huge grin.

\---

“Do you think about things before you do them?!” Tharak yelled over the sirens. He was struggling to keep pace with Keith, who was bounding ahead of him. “Because it really doesn’t seem like you do!”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it!” Keith yelled back, sprinting through the corridors, ignoring the blaring sounds and flashing lights. He didn’t stop to process what those warning signs meant, he had a singular task on his mind; retrieving his Marmora dagger.

A robotic Galra soldier ran towards him, and he sliced it half with cunning expertise, never once breaking stride. A few shots were fired at him, but he spun out of the way before they could hit. He hit another robot with the butt of his blade, and then cleaved the head clean off. In a shower of sparks, the robot fell in front of him. He hopped over it and landed on the ground running, leaving Tharak in the dust.

The doors to the central control room shuddered open before him. The room was much darker than it had been before, most likely because it was night out. The Galra at the computers had scattered, leaving only a few robotic soldiers present. One of them was Commander Cyrin, still perched on his dais, barking orders at his robots.

In one large, purple hand was the Marmora dagger. Keith’s own hand tightened on the grip of his sword.

“Cyrin,” spat Keith. The huge Galra looked up, bright yellow eyes narrowing, and his lip quivering with rage.

“End him!” roared the commander, and the robots poised to take fire. Then, the sirens stopped, the red warning lights flickered off, and the robots powered down and collapsed at the Galra’s feet. 

If that discouraged Cyrin, he didn’t show it. Instead, the huge Galra twirled Keith’s blade in his hand, and descended from the dais. Keith found himself easing into a battle stance, his sword arm going rigid. 

When Cyrin came at him, Keith didn’t expect the Galra to use his fist. The commander swiped at Keith with one huge claw, and with the residual force threw Keith bodily across the control room. Keith crashed into a computer terminal, but thankfully his armor took a majority of the impact.

Keith was back on his feet in an instant, dancing past and dodging Cyrin’s blows. He brought his sword up, slicing a clean cut through Cyrin’s armor. The Galra hissed and took a few steps back to recover, leaving his left flank exposed. 

Keith saw the opening, and was immediately on it. Cyrin took the opportunity to parry Keith’s blade with the Marmora dagger. Sparks shot into the air, and with an expert flick of the wrist, Keith was able to disarm Cyrin. The dagger clattered to the ground.

Cyrin reached out for Keith with the other arm as he scrambled to get to his dagger. He grabbed Keith by the collar and hauled him up moments before his fingers could brush the hilt of his blade.

Keith flew through the air, landing hard on his back. Cyrin was on him in an instant, grabbing his chestpiece and slamming him back into the ground. All of Keith’s aches and pains from the fight with Prise blossomed to life yet again. He sucked in a breath, suddenly desperate for air.

He felt himself be lifted from the ground, and kicked out at the Galra. He could hear Cyrin growl, and then he was sent tumbling through the air. He landed on his stomach this time, on the hard ground instead of on a computer tower. He felt the oxygen leave his lungs and it left him gasping.

“I will not be bested by a child!” Cyrin roared. Keith could hear the alien’s heavy footsteps. A sturdy claw clamped around Keith’s boot, and the Red Paladin was flung to the side. This time, he wasn’t sure he had the energy to gasp for the air he needed.

Cyrin planted a heavy foot on Keith’s neck, pressing down. Keith tried to breathe, but all that came out was a rattle as Cyrin crushed his windpipe. An aura surrounded his vision, and globules of black consumed all he saw.

There was a gunshot, a cry from Cyrin, and then Keith’s oxygen and sight returned. He allowed himself two coughs to clear his throat, and immediately made it to his feet despite the pain.

Cyrin was clutching his shoulder, and a very shaky Tharak was holding a smoking gun; the very same which Tarvus had used to hold him at gunpoint. He took one hand quickly off the weapon to adjust his glasses, and then it was back on the gun, finger on the trigger.

It took the commander a few moments to realize that it was Tharak that had shot him, but when he did, it didn’t take long for him to round on the smaller Galra in anger. He rushed Tharak, knocking the engineer to the ground with an uppercut.

“I will kill you, and then I will kill the Paladin, and then I will get off of this backwater rock,” Cyrin breathed through his teeth, his chest heaving profusely. He reached for Tharak, who hadn’t made it up off of the ground, and picked him up the neck. The tiny Galra made a terrible choking noise.

Keith moved like a snake in the grass with his bayard at the ready. Crouched low, he sprung like a cat towards Cyrin, and like a whip, shot his sword out towards the huge Galra.

The blade curved upwards and sliced through the neck of the Galra commander, severing flesh from bone and muscle. Blood spurted like a faucet from under Cyrin’s chin, splattering Tharak in red.

The commander managed to turn only a few degrees before collapsing, Tharak falling hard with him. The smaller Galra made an audible ‘Oof!’ sound as the commander fell on top of him. 

Keith slid the blade of his sword out of Cyrin’s neck, thankful that it was dark enough that, if he didn’t focus, he couldn’t really see the blood. He felt like falling to his knees, but locked his legs so that he would stay upright.

“We’re not done yet,” Keith wheezed to Tharak, plodding over to where the Marmora dagger was on the ground. He bent over and picked it up, looking at the glowing blue symbol. He clutched the dagger close to his chest, bent his head down, and breathed. He hadn’t felt this calm in weeks.

“Keith?” a familiar voice squeaked.

The Red Paladin turned. He felt like there was electricity running through his veins.

Standing in the large doorway to the command center was Pidge, followed closely behind by Lance and Hunk. She was taking in the sights around her, of Keith, of Cyrin and Tharak, and her eyes were wide. But she was smiling.

“Oh, Pidge,” breathed Keith. He felt himself grin. “Oh, you guys.”

Pidge ran at Keith, and he opened his arms. She met him in an embrace, and he closed his arms around her. He picked her up off of her feet and spun her around, and soon the two of them were enclosed by both Lance and Hunk.

“You guys came,” Keith said in wonder, as though he hadn’t even considered it.

“Well, duh,” said Lance, breaking off the hug. He still had his blaster in one hand, which made the prolonged contact a bit awkward. He gave Keith a noncommittal shrug with a smug smile.

Hunk was the second to break off, and nodded. “As soon as humanly possible. Though, we may not have told Allura. Not sure how that’s going to go down when we get back. Prepare for a scolding.”

Keith looked away, unusually sheepish. “I’m sure we can handle it.”

“Um. Keith?” piped up Pidge. “Can you let me down?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry,” Keith mumbled, releasing the Green Paladin from his arms. She dropped farther than he expected. Surely there wasn’t that much of a height difference between them.

“The Paladins of Voltron!” exclaimed Tharak, who had clambered out from under Cyrin’s body. The Galra officer uniform made Lance, Hunk, and Pidge all exchange nervous looks.

“It’s okay, guys,” Keith reassured them. “This is Tharak. He helped me escape from our cell.”

Tharak tried to smile, but the sharp canines did little in terms of amiability.

Hunk regarded Tharak, and then shrugged. “Any friend of Keith’s is a friend of mine. I’m Hunk.”

“Lance, the Blue Paladin,” said Lance coolly, tipping an invisible hat at the Galra.

“Pidge,” said Pidge. Her expression was unreadable.

Tharak performed a deep bow to the three of them. Only Hunk and Lance returned it with curt nods.

“Well,” said Lance, returning his blaster to its bayard form. “Let’s go get the red lion back up to snuff, and report to the Castle for a debriefing. This was still a successful mission, right?”

Keith nodded slowly, his bayard blade reverting to its original form. He placed it on his belt, but found that he couldn’t do the same for his Marmora blade. He had risked his life for the thing, he was going to keep it close to his person. 

With the dagger’s blade pressed to his chest, Keith nodded. “Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and staying on with In Remission! As my first fic, it means so much to me when you guys give me kudos or have nice things to say. I hope everything I'm doing is okay so far.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters in the same week. Crazy stuff. Taking some liberties with universe expansion because why not.
> 
> Since we've reached the tenth installment of In Remission, I figure anyone who likes this fic can reach out to me on Tumblr at shaitanist and hit me up!

“What’s the third planet in the system from the primary star?” asked Pidge, her face practically pressed into her hailer.

Both she and Keith were seated on his bed, legs folded as they occupied themselves with their separate tasks. Keith was busy inspecting his claws, flicking a nail under another every so often just to get acquainted to the foreign feel of it all. He could feel his skin shifting and itching every passing day, and the skin of his forearms looked like it was peppered in nasty bruises.

“Um,” mumbled Keith, snagging his sheets with a claw. He let out a huff in frustration. “I don’t know, Ambellina?”

Pidge gave him a dirty look and shook her head, adjusting her glasses as she did so. Exasperation was plain on her face. “That’s not even a planet, that’s a space station.” 

“Well, technically, it’s between the second and third planets that orbit Edin, so it could be the third, uh, object that orbits our primary star,” offered Tharak, who was seated some ways away in a chair. He was reading from what appeared to be an old Altean tablet, and the glasses he wore now were a far cry from his yellow tinted and cracked readers. They were distinctly Pidge-esque. Every time he swiped the tablet screen his claw clacked on it.

Putting her face in her hands, Pidge mumbled some words at Tharak. “You know, you didn’t have to be here. You actually really don’t need to be here right now. I can teach Keith about your solar system, probably.”

Keith frowned. While Hunk and Lance had accepted Tharak with open arms, Pidge hadn’t embraced the newcomer as well as he had hoped she would. Even Allura, who at first had been apprehensive, eventually caved. Once she got over the initial shock of when Tharak had exited the blue lion with Lance and Keith, that is. There had been a lot of gun pointing and screaming, which gave Keith a sour taste of what would happen if he wasn’t out of the Castle of Lions by the time his transformation began to make itself apparent.

But he tried not to think about that.

“I’m just here to help. Why learn about our solar system...our culture from a, no offense, alien, when you can learn it from me?” Tharak offered with an indifferent shrug. Keith wondered if he had phrased it like that on purpose. 

Pidge looked like her blood was set to boil, but she didn’t say anything about that further. “Keith, the third planet from the primary star?” she tried again, one eyebrow raised incredulously.

“Quiznak, Pidge, I already said I didn’t know,” Keith said defensively, pulling up his hailer as though it would shield him from her anger.

“It’s Gal, Keith!” Pidge exclaimed, fuming. “Third planet from Edin, just like our Sun and--” she looked at Tharak, and decided not to finish the sentence.

Tharak’s ears folded back into his hair. “Oh, I get it. You can share the super secret mission you’re keeping from Princess Allura with the Galra, but not the name of your home planet,” he said, his voice twinged with an emotion Keith couldn't quite place. He set the tablet onto his lap and sighed. 

Letting Tharak in on the plan had been Keith’s idea, much to Pidge’s dismay. The reality of it was that Keith surmised that Tharak would have figured out something was up anyway. It was either for all of them if Keith was up front about the situation.

It had been one or two nights after the Paladins had managed to heft the red lion back to the Castle of Lions, and Keith finally decided to spill the beans after consulting both Pidge and Kolivan. It was hard to read Kolivan, but Keith had begun to think that he was regretting instigating all of this. The Galra had shrugged nonchalantly and reminded him that, above all, Allura and Coran were not allowed to know about it. At least not yet.

With the decision made, Keith had arrived at a reasonable hour to Tharak’s rooms, and delivered to him a carefully worded explanation about what was going on.

“You know,” Tharak had said, adjusting an Altean nightshirt over his person. “I had wondered about the,” the Galra paused and made a swiping motion with his claws. “I wasn’t going to say anything, no way, but it’s not every day you see a--what are you called, human?”

“Mostly,” Keith responded curtly.

“Yeah, it’s not every day you see a human, soft creatures, they are, with claws,” Tharak finished, even though he was still making motions with his hands that reminded Keith of a tyrannosaurus rex.

Keith’s eyes widened. “How do you know what humans are?” He recalled that Prise had said something about them too, before he gutted her like a fish.

He was apparently staring so intently at Tharak that the Galra seemed a little bit flustered. “Well, the Champion, of course.”

The Champion. Keith paused momentarily, taking the time to absorb what Tharak had said. “Did you...did you know the Champion?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Tharak burst out laughing, practically doubling over where he stood. “Did I know the Champion? I’d give all the light from Edin to meet the Champion, Keith. A truly masterful warrior, he was, even for a human.”

Keith frowned, folding his arms and turning away. He felt his face heat up, but with embarrassment or disappointment, he wasn’t sure. “Of course you didn’t know him. You were stationed on that lifeless rock.”

The Galra shrugged, moving to sit on his bed. “A former Balmera, I think. But it was active and died long before we all came around. But yeah, that’s me, the galaxy’s best and brightest, squandered to live out my miserable existence on a ‘lifeless rock’ under the tyranny of an incompetent commander.”

“Modest,” Keith commented, looking at his hands. He still wore the gloves he had stolen from the armory on Sector Alpha. “You thought Cyrin was incompetent?”

“Oh, absolutely. But that’s besides the point,” replied Tharak, who was now sprawled out on his bed comfortably. “There wasn’t a lot to do in Sector Alpha, except to watch the fights. Watching the Champion rise up from nothing, that was a highlight of my existence. It was...visceral.”

“...How do you mean?” Keith asked, sitting down on the bed beside him. Tharak pulled up his legs to make space.

Tharak hefted himself up into a sitting position, and placed a tightly clenched fist in the other hand. “At the end, he craved the fight. It was exhilarating. It was like watching a cub taking its first tender steps, and then wham!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. Keith jumped. “Breaking into a full blown sprint.”

Keith focused hard on the sheets, bunching a handful of them into his gloved hand. The metal plates and clacked and clinked together. When he looked up, he didn’t meet Tharak’s eyes. “Where do you think the... Champion is now?”

Tharak considered this, one ear flicking in thought. “Dead, probably. They don’t last long in the arena. There’s always someone new; someone faster, stronger, or smarter than the last. Probably smarter. It always pays off to be lightyears ahead of your enemies.”

“Yeah?” mumbled Keith, uncertain if he wanted to hear anymore. He was beginning to feel sick. He couldn’t tell if the queasy feeling in his gut was the commencement of a vomiting bout, or if he just couldn’t face the fact that Shiro could be dead.

“Of course, Keith,” Tharak said smoothly and confidently. The smile he gave seemed genuine enough. “Smarts are everything. And with your plan, brilliantly tweaked by yours truly, you can find Shiro no problem.”

Keith nodded, feeling hollow. He kept the fact that Shiro was the Champion to himself.

The days following their fateful meeting had been uneventful. Allura was reluctant to let the lions out of their hangars unless it was the utmost of emergencies. Keith tried his best to seem as normal as possible, but it was difficult. His body was changing so fast he wasn’t sure if he could keep up with it.

The gloves stayed on. In armor, out of armor, he walked the halls of the Castle of Lions in the gauntlets from Sector Alpha. He didn’t want to admit that he liked them, but every time one of the fluorescent skylights shone on them and the light refracted off of that sleek black metal, he thought they were a slight upgrade from his traditional fingerless gloves.

Lance had complimented him on them one afternoon while they were sparring. Keith shook out his hand after delivering a thorough beating to a punching bag, and flexed his fingers to show them off.

“You couldn’t have gotten me some?” asked Lance jokingly, whose leg shot out and made contact with a dummy. The dummy rocked back and forth, but otherwise stayed in place. He followed up with another kick with the opposite leg, and then an uppercut punch. 

Keith shook his head. “I was a little busy not getting shot by Galra. Next time, I’ll get you a pair. In blue,” he promised, wiping his forehead with a sweat rag. He had opted for a longer, black shirt to spar in and was currently feeling the effects. Longsleeves weren’t easy to breathe in, and he could feel himself sweating under it. If only he could roll up his sleeves.

“Great. I’ll hold you to it, I need an accessory like that to bring out my eyes,” Lance added with a demure bat of his eyelashes. Keith tried to suppress a smile, but failed, and the both of them ended up having a hearty, but short lived chuckle. It was good to be back on the Castle of Lions.

Keith walked over to the edge of the training room where there was a bottle of water on a bench. He took a long swig, and then turned towards Lance. He dangled it out in front of him and offered it out to the Blue Paladin.

Lance made his way over to Keith’s side and graciously accepted the water bottle. He was about to put it to his mouth, when he suddenly stopped.

Keith stopped wiping his neck with his sweat rag. “What?”

“Are you...taller?” Lance asked, eyes narrowing. 

Keith could feel his heartbeat in his throat, and his stomach dropped. He had always been an inch or two shorter than Lance. He looked at his friend and discovered that he, in fact, was looking down at the Blue Paladin.

“Must be the shoes,” Keith managed, swallowing uncomfortably. He bunched the sweat rag in his hand to prevent his hand from shaking.

“You got new shoes at Sector Alpha too?” asked Lance, immediately looking down. “Dude, why didn’t you just get a whole new wardrobe change while you’re at it? Maybe lose the fanny packs.”

“I like the fanny packs,” Keith countered, maybe a bit too defensively. Lance grinned, and Keith felt sick all over again. “And no, I didn’t get new ones, maybe these are just…”

“Just…?”

“...Taller shoes.”

Lance snorted and clapped Keith on the back. “Whatever, dude. Sometimes you just gotta wear heels. Though, maybe sneakers would work better for training next time.”

“I’m not wearing--” Keith began frustratedly, nowhere near done with Lance, but the Blue Paladin was already on his way out of the training room.

He let out a wavering sigh. He didn’t have a lot of time.

It was from the training room that Keith had called up Pidge and Tharak to join him in his quarters for a lesson. So far, Tharak had been less than helpful. If anything, he was hindering Pidge. Keith could see how on edge she was in the presence of the Galra, and decided now was a good time to intervene.

“We don’t want to offend you, Tharak,” Keith began gently, unsure how to proceed. Pidge had just demonstrated how much she trusted him, and it wasn’t at all. “We know you want to help. But Pidge knows a lot, and she’s been spending a long time getting this information for me.”

The Galra folded his arms over his chest, his attention on the tablet on his lap. Pidge’s lips twitched, but she didn’t dare smile in front of Tharak.

“Maybe, for the textbook information, Pidge can be my teacher,” offered Keith, shooting the Green Paladin a pointed look. “And you can help me with the stuff that I can’t learn by reading.”

One of Tharak’s ears flicked. He looked up from the tablet and adjusted the glasses over the bridge of his flat, feline nose. He gave that toothy smile that Keith was used to seeing by now.

“But, until then, you don’t need to be here,” Keith said quietly. Tharak immediately deflated, and Keith kept his face carefully neutral. “I’ll let you know when I need you, and trust me, I will. I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”

“You know where to find me,” said Tharak, his voice twinged with disappointment, getting up from the chair and picking up his tablet. The door to Keith’s room slid open, and without any hesitation Tharak slipped out of it and was gone from sight.

“Ugh, I thought he’d never leave,” said Pidge, flipping pages on her hailer.

“You don’t have to be rude to him,” Keith muttered, rubbing a shoulder absentmindedly.

“You’re right. You’re usually the rude one,” Pidge countered and Keith shoved her lightly. She let out a laugh, but it was short and cut.

“Pidge, what is it?” asked Keith, trying to meet her eyes. She carefully avoided his gaze. “You’ve been weird. And not like normal, either. I can tell there’s something wrong.”

Finally, Pidge looked up at Keith. “There’s just stuff that doesn’t quite add up. Well, one thing, and it bothers me.”

“Yeah?” said Keith, leaning in closer.

Pidge bent towards him, her voice nothing more than a whisper. She looked towards the door as though someone might be listening. “You were captured by the Galra. Where were you held?”

“...In a prison? I don’t know, there was a cell. Why?” he asked. Pidge frowned. “What is it?”

“When I hacked Sector Alpha’s mainframe, I looked at a layout of the the base,” Pidge explained. With a few taps on the screen, she brought the map up on her hailer, and showed it to Keith. He didn’t really remember much about the layout of the base, but he saw the armory and the central command center.

“Uh-huh?” prompted Keith.

“Do you see anywhere on this map that denotes a prison?” asked Pidge, shoving her hailer at him. He held it gingerly in his hands, trying to be careful of his claws and the glass screen.

“No? But Pidge, that’s a really...bad reason to not trust someone,” Keith mumbled, pushing the hailer back at her. “I was in a prison cell with him. He was in chains, and he needed help. He thought I was going to kill him.”

Pidge pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration, and sighed. “Why would he think that?”

Keith recalled being dumped into the cell, covered in the blood and gore of the late Corporal Prise. “I couldn’t say.”

The Green Paladin sighed. “Look, I just want to be careful.”

“I know you do, Pidge. But, it’s kind of…” Keith trailed. Was he actually going to say this? He felt like it needed to be said. “It feels like you’re not trusting him because he’s Galra.”

“No! That’s not it. I mean, it might be a factor, but there are other circumstances,” Pidge backpedaled, but she had already overstepped.

Keith held up his hands, the dark purple blotches apparent on his pale skin. “Do you trust me? When I look like him, are you going to trust me?”

Pidge’s gaze turned steely. “I don’t trust your judgement, no. Look at your track record so far. Also, don’t you dare turn this around and make it about yourself,” she hissed. “You always do that. It’s always about you, isn’t it?”

The fire to fight with her died inside of him, but she had really stung him with that nasty remark. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just don’t think you’re right.” His delivery was chopped and curt.

Pidge pursed her lips, and then flicked her hailer off. “I’m going to find Hunk, we probably have maintenance to do. You can review by yourself.”

“Pidge, I--” Keith began, but she was already off of his bed and out the door in a flash.

When the automatic door shuddered closed behind her, Keith sighed. He gathered his pillow in his arms and buried his claws into it, liking the way it felt underneath his fingernails. With a satisfying ripping noise, the cloth tore and feathers erupted from its cotton prison all over the room. 

Keith sputtered and waved a few feathers out of his face. With a heavy sigh, he wiped a few more feathers from the sheets and off of his hailer, his claws scratching on the screen, and began his studies again.

“And the third planet from Edin is Gal…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I don't want to sound like a broken record, but comments and kudos really make my day and can really motivate me, so if you want to leave one feel free! Thanks especially to all y'all who have been so far. :)


	11. Chapter 11

Keith knew he was dreaming.

It was the only logical explanation for what was happening at the moment. He drifted through crowds in a dark city, lost in a sea of people. Civilians scurried for cover from the rain that fell out of a black sky.

The ground was warm, and like a thunderstorm on a summer day, mist rose from the earth. When he breathed, he tasted the humid air, wet and hot on his tongue. The acrid scent of exhaust was nearly palpable, and caused him to shut his mouth.

He didn’t know where he was going, except with the crowd. Rain dampened bodies shoved him to and fro, but he persisted. Buildings towered over them all, their lights bleary and blindingly white, orange, and red.

Was he back on Earth? This was like no place he had ever seen. Thunder cracked and the sky rumbled. He was used to seeing storm clouds in the distance, heavy with rain, but they never dared make their way to his shack in the desert. He knew it rained long and often in the northern parts of Texas, but it wasn’t welcome among the tumbleweeds and cacti in the place he called home.

He breathed out, his breath cold compared to the hot rain. The crowd guided him, prodded him, and ushered him past the tall buildings and the dark alleys to perhaps the most striking construction he had ever seen.

If there had been sunlight, Keith was sure that the structure would have reflected it. A feat of engineering, with sharp edges and facets that were shaped every which way. Blue and purple lights zipped across it in sleek lines, denoting windows and pathways and rooms. Lightning flashed behind it, revealing its domelike shape and metallic chrome exterior. As the electricity arced purple through the sky, the entire building shone white. It hurt his eyes.

While he stopped to admire the view, the rest of the crowd didn’t. He was roughly shoved forward, and stumbled as the bodies around him threatened to crush him. He could feel himself get uncomfortably hot, and he broke out into a sweat.

The heat of the bodies was getting cloying. Where they were going, he didn’t know, but they were out of the rain. Inside, fluorescent purple lights sparsely lined hallways, which were subsequently blotted out by the sheer number of people alone. The light faded into darkness, and Keith reached out blindly, hoping to find someone to hold onto.

A bright blue light bathed him, his undersuit turning a cyan. When he looked up, he was no longer in those dim hallways, but was seated high above a raucous plethora of people, who jeered and cheered and were so loud that Keith had half a mind to cover his ears.

Below him, below the crowds and their noises, there was an expanse of metal. A flat slab, maybe half the size of a playing field. Nothing was demarcated, but Keith could make out that the field was made of multiple plates of what appeared to be steel.

There were so many people. Despite the sheer size of the room, the scope of this amazing building, Keith felt like he was being consumed. He rose to his feet, unsure whether it was entirely of his own accord, and spread out his arms.

The crowd roared like the thunder outside.

It was a deafening noise, and he responded, or at least he thought he did, by raising his hands higher. He let one fall to his side, and upturned the other purple palm at the air. When he tried to bring it down, his arm felt like an immovable rod of steel.

“Enter,” he rumbled, in a voice deeper than anything he had ever heard before. The people beneath him screamed jovial cries and yelled at the the field below. He felt his eyelids quiver, like he was succumbing to a fever.

On either side of the arena, the doors shuttered open. From the door closest to him came Corporal Prise, with her light colored complexion and shock of white hair. She was donned in the same armor she had been when she had faced off against him. With a confident look at the crowd, she raised her palm in the air, mimicking Keith. It awarded her fierce cries from the crowd.

At the other end of the field, from the blackness of the open doors, emerged Shiro. As unscathed as he had been in Keith’s previous dream, the Black Paladin had his eyes turned towards the ground. 

Keith tried to call out, to do anything, but his lips were sealed shut. Mentally, he squealed and kicked against the confines of his bodily prison. His arm was still raised above his head, his twisted claws turned up towards the air. 

“Begin,” Keith roared, his voice booming over the crowd, and Shiro and Prise were at each other in an instant.

It didn’t take long for Shiro to overpower Prise. Despite the difficulty Keith had had with her, she was no match for the prowess of the Black Paladin.

Shiro’s glowing hand passed clear through her chest cavity, and out the other side. Blood spurted from the wound, sizzling and crackling on the energy that his arm gave off. Despite the distance, Keith could smell Prise’s blood cooking. He tried to turn away, but he was frozen in place.

Shiro’s arm slid cleanly into Prise’s body, and when he flexed his fingers, blood spattered. He withdrew his hand, his eyes still glued to the ground. He turned away from the crowd, from Keith.

Above the arena, there were cries for the Champion. Yellow eyes by the thousands beat down on the Black Paladin. Some threw food while others simply squawked and squealed for more bloodshed. Red began pooling under Prise, who twitched sporadically. 

Miming Keith’s motions, Shiro twisted his palm up towards the air. The decibels of sound rose considerably. Keith moved his hands, and everyone quieted. He tried to scream.

Prise shuddered, gasping for a breath that would never come. Shiro’s Galra arm glowed.

Keith wanted to cry out, he desperately wanted Shiro to leave her be. She had suffered enough, she would be dead soon. There was nothing more that needed to be done. He struggled against the confines of his body, to open his mouth and tell Shiro to stop, that it was over.

The Black Paladin loomed dangerously over Prise, the Galra tech humming to life in a shower iridescent sparks. Shiro pressed his fingers together and flattened his palm, and brought his hand down on Prise’s head.

Keith took a step forward, screamed, and broke free.

His legs felt like they were unraveling, and he pitched forward off of the platform he was standing on. He fell down through the crowd, passing a million faces on his descent. The wind whipped at his face, blowing his bangs back. Would he die when he landed on the ground? He didn’t know.

He felt his stomach churn as gravity pulled him down. He spun in the air, reaching for anything that might give him a handhold. 

He wasn’t prepared for what he grabbed. The arena seemed to shift, his perception of reality dangerously skewed. When he removed his hand, it was red with gore. With a sickly squelching noise, he removed it from Prise and stood over her corpse. The room spun.

“No… not again, please,” he begged, spreading his fingers. Trails of blood webbed the spaces between his digits.

“Begin.”

Keith looked up at the platform which he had fallen from. Even though the arena stretched for miles above him, he could clearly make out the figure sitting laxly in the chair, one hand raised to the sky.

Zarkon.

Keith cried out as Shiro’s fist made contact with his cheek. He could feel the bones in his face crack from the impact. He managed to keep his footing, but didn’t have the heart to strike back.

The Black Paladin knocked him to the ground with a backhand. Keith fell with little resistance. He was only in his undersuit, so he could feel the cold metal on his back, a small relief from the way everything around him felt feverish.

“Shiro, please. This isn’t you,” Keith pleaded, holding one hand out against the Black Paladin. His bloody, trembling hand did little to stop Shiro from hoisting him up.

Shiro held the Red Paladin up towards the crowd, displaying him like a trophy for everyone to see. The jeering Galra roared in his face. Zarkon’s bright purple eyes met Keith’s, and the giant Galra’s hand closed into a fist. 

Keith felt Shiro release his grip on his undersuit, and the Red Paladin fell to his knees. He breathed haggardly through his mouth, his breath coming in short and tired gasps.

“Giving up so soon?” Shiro growled in his ear. But it didn’t sound like Shiro. It sounded old and ancient and reverberated against his eardrum like rolling thunder.

It sounded like Zarkon.

Keith wheezed, turning his head so he didn’t have to look at the Galra. What he saw was Shiro’s face, so like him, but so unlike him. The familiar planes of his face, the tuft of white hair, the scar across the bridge of his nose.

And unseeing yellow eyes.

It was then that Keith struggled. Shiro, or not Shiro, or whatever this was, had its hands on Keith’s shoulders. It forced Keith’s face away from its own, taking a handful of his hair and yanking on it, forcing Keith’s head down towards the ground.

Keith’s vision left him as this Shiro, or whatever itwas, closed the distance between them and pressed its hands against his eyes. He grabbed at the monster’s arms, but they were as tough as wrought iron and as immovable. Keith let out a pained noise that sounded far too close to a whimper, his claws not finding purchase on Shiro’s armor.

“Let’s see about making us match, hmm?” decidedly not Shiro asked, and began to press its fingers inwards. Keith felt the pressure, first near his tear ducts, and squirmed in the creature’s iron grip. The pressure quickly gave way to a pain, bearable only for the first few moments.

Keith felt hot rivulets of something trickle down from his eyes as the monster pushed, and pushed, and pushed. He screamed, clawing at the shadow of his brother, begging it to stop, begging for it to end. 

His cries and pleas for help melted into an incoherent string of half-formed words and prayers. When the monster released him, he fell to the ground, which felt much softer than before.

When he grabbed at the earth, it came to him like cloth in his hands. There was a sharp and stabbing pain in the back of his eyes, like he had taken an ice pick to both sockets and left it there to fester.

“Paladin,” Keith heard a strong voice say. He flinched back reflexively, grasping around for things he could not see. He could hear himself breathing, gasping really, for air as he tried to process what just happened.

“I… can’t see,” Keith sobbed, holding tightly to what he assumed were bed sheets. He was trembling, and couldn’t seem to get enough air. Even though everything was dark, he felt like the room was spinning beneath him, as though he was along for the ride on the world’s fastest carousel.

“Paladin,” the voice tried again. “Breathe.”

“I can’t,” he replied. “I can’t see… I can’t, I can’t,” he took in a deep breath to compensate. “I can’t breathe.”

“Your eyes are closed. You need to open them,” tried the voice for a third time. Blood pounded in Keith’s ears. “Open your eyes for me, and remember to breathe.”

Carefully, Keith raised his shaking hands to his eyes. His cheeks were wet, but with tears or blood he did not know. He felt for his eyes, feeling the tips of his claws prick against his delicate skin. He shuddered and inhaled, loud and long.

Pain surged through Keith’s eyes as he opened them. He winced, sucking in a few more breaths as light flooded his vision. “Too bright,” Keith managed, putting a hand over his face. “Please… too bright. It hurts.”

“The lights are off. Open your eyes,” demanded the voice.

Another wave of pain lanced through Keith’s eyes as he removed his hands. For a room where the lights were supposedly off, everything looked suspiciously well lit. With his eyes still narrowed, he cautiously surveyed his surroundings.

He was once again in Kolivan’s quarters. He was upright on the bed, with his hands buried in the sheets. His knuckles would have been white with the lack of blood, if not for the fact that his skin was blotched a very dark purple.

Across from him, standing with his hands folded behind his back, was Kolivan. He looked as serious and as grave as ever. 

“That’s… the last one, right? The last injection?” Keith asked, breathing shallowly. He wasn’t quite ready to release the bed covers yet.

“It should be,” Kolivan said with a nod. After a few moments of dead air, he continued. “Are you alright, Paladin?”

“I don’t know,” Keith admitted, looking down. The purple licked at his elbows almost hungrily, and he could swear he could feel it moving beneath his skin. It hurt to blink. “Every time I think I am, something brings me back to square one.”

Kolivan didn’t add anything, but remained at Keith’s side.

“These dreams I have. They’re all about Shiro. Me finally finding Shiro,” Keith said openly. “But they never quite pan out how I want them to.”

“Things rarely do,” replied the Galra. He turned from where he was standing, and took a few steps towards a desk. He sighed. “Paladin, I will leave you now. Feel free to rest.”

Keith wanted to argue, but could think of no real reason for Kolivan to stay by his side. He really wished he hadn’t angered Pidge, he couldn’t bear to be alone right now.

So he remained in bed for what felt like hours, too shaken up to move. But when his muscles started to cramp and he found himself tossing and turning, he decided he was left with no other option.

Unfolding himself, Keith managed to clamber out of the bed. He had to steady himself when his feet touched the floor, and then again when he reached the edge of the room.

On Kolivan’s door was a full length mirror. Fairly utilitarian, it was cut sharply at the edges into a long rectangle. In the mirror was Keith, dark purple tendrils curling viciously around his arms, threatening to suck the rest of him in.

Between the darkness of the room and the reflection of the mirror, Keith’s eyes glowed a bright and vacuous yellow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! We will return to more plot oriented programming approximately next week.


	12. Chapter 12

“And he can be… so dense sometimes,” said Pidge, hitting the training pad that Lance was holding up. Despite striking it with about all the force she could muster, the Blue Paladin didn’t move.

“Oh, no kidding,” Lance agreed, bending his elbows so that he wouldn’t take the full impact of Pidge’s blows. Two punches later, Pidge was out of breath. “C’mon, give me more than that. Think about how angry you are, and, uh, think about how much you want to punch Keith in the gob.”

Pidge glared at him. “And mess up his mouth more? No thanks,” she said, but delivered another punch anyway. Air whistled out of the pad, but Lance still didn’t budge. 

“Oh, yeah, that looked pretty bad. I thought the healing pod could like, you know, heal stuff,” Lance commented, yawning while Pidge punched at him. She punched, and punched, and kicked, and then rested her hands on her knees, breathing out heavily.

“I think the healing pods can make it stop bleeding. I don’t think they can provide professional orthodontia,” Pidge remarked between breaths. Lance shook the pad, taunting her.

“You know how that happened?” Lance asked, stepping back so that when Pidge went to punch the pad, she fell forward.

Barely catching herself, Pidge carried her body forward and delivered a blow to the pad with some momentum. Lance bent his knees to absorb the blow. “I just assumed some soldier kicked his teeth in. I didn’t want to ask. Why would he tell me, anyway? He only talks to Tharak lately.”

Lance sighed, and put the pad down. “I think it’s kind of good for him?” he offered, stepping back from the Green Paladin in case she decided to punch him for real this time for that comment.

Pidge, who had been bending over to pick up her glasses, looked perturbed. “Why?”

Lance shrugged, looking down. “He’s...eating again? And he’s talking? And a few days ago, I told a joke and he laughed at it. Keith! Keith laughed at my joke!” he explained, pointing to himself. “And he hasn’t said anything about...you know...ever since we got back from that Galra base.”

Pidge considered this. Keith had in fact been talking a mile a minute about Shiro, to both she and Tharak. Most of it had to do with finding Shiro. Where could he possibly be? Keith believed that Shiro had to be on Gal. It was the only way that Pidge wouldn’t be able to find him in any database.

There were relatively few things that Pidge didn’t know or couldn’t find out. She had scoured the universe for Shiro, who had miraculously disappeared after they had defeated Zarkon, to no avail. She had searched multiple solar systems for Matt and her father, but that had proved fruitless as well. A part of her wished that Keith wouldn’t find Shiro on Gal; it shouldn’t be that easy for him, especially when she had worked so hard. Another part of her crushed those thoughts before they could fully form as she delivered another punch.

Pidge felt her knuckles crack as she incorrectly delivered a blow to the pad. She sucked in a breath of air and retracted, shaking out her hand. “I think I’m done for the day.”

“But we’re just getting started,” complained Lance, who dropped the training pad despite the protests.

“I need to wrap my hands before we start this. They hurt too much,” Pidge argued right back, flexing her fingers. 

“Or you can get some cool gloves like Keith has,” Lance suggested, reaching for a water bottle.

Pidge sighed, brushing strands of sweat-damp hair out of her eyes and off of her neck. “Maybe,” she mumbled. “I’m going to go...do something else. Thanks for the sparring lesson.”

“No problem,” said Lance cheerily with a sly smile. He tapped his head, and then the bump of his bicep when he flexed for her. “One day, I’m gonna keep you here long enough so that you’ll be as jacked as I am.”

“Sure you will,” Pidge said lightly, and with a quick nod, exited the training room. Lance waved at her as the sliding doors opened in front of her.

Pidge told herself that she didn’t know where she was going, but the route she was taking was all too familiar. Time and again, under duress or not, she turned these ways through the halls. She paused before the door, contemplating. 

Was she really going to stride into the command center and demand Allura get rid of Tharak? She cautiously reached her hand out so that the sensor would react to her presence before the door, but sharply retracted it.

Pidge could formulate in her head the questions that Allura would follow up with. Maybe Allura would be surprised, maybe Allura wouldn’t be. She couldn’t tell with Allura when it came to the Galra, when it came to dealing with the people that had destroyed her people, her planet, and entire way of existence. 

With Keith, Allura’s trust had to be regained after her initial suspicion. Kolivan had proven himself in the battle against Haggar, with the loss of Antok. These would-be enemies were some of Allura’s closest allies. If Keith hadn’t wanted to willingly abandon Voltron in pursuit of Shiro, Pidge would have argued that he should have come clean to the Princess when the whole process started. But, she surmised that the process wouldn’t even have begun in the first place, had Keith not been so desperate for his friend.

With a heavy heart and a heavier sigh, Pidge turned away. Tharak had wiggled his way into Pidge’s carefully constructed plans about how to proceed next, and she wasn’t going to let him. As kind and charismatic as the tiny Galra had been, there was no merit to any of his actions thus far.

Tharak had explained to the Paladins when they had returned to the Castle of Lions that he had been discharged from his station on Sector Alpha for trying to disable the EMP that had blasted the red lion out of orbit. Discharged, Pidge had learned from Tharak later that day, meant summarily executed in front of his commanding officer. Cyrin, preoccupied with the red lion, had imprisoned Tharak temporarily until he could be dealt with. Luckily for him, he had said, Keith had been deposited in the very same cell. 

She had returned to her room shortly after Tharak had been settled, and had gone to work from there. Whatever information Tharak had given them thus far concerning the Galra empire had been little and, for the most part, useless. He had managed to share his station and rank, and from those two points she had managed to find out only one thing; his credentials didn’t quite match.

In Galra culture, Pidge had learned from both Tharak and her readings, the surname was far more important than the given name. There had been a multitude of Tharaks, along with Thaces when she had only managed the first few letters of her search query, that she had sifted through using the same programs she had utilized trying to find Matt, Shiro, and her father. Only one had caught her attention.

A certain Tharak, Kirei, stationed on B-5862 Sector Alpha. Lieutenant and Director of Explosives and Ballistics Engineering.

Keith had argued that Tharak had indeed said that he was the former director of the engineering division on Sector Alpha. Pidge had countered, asking why he had left out the explosives and ballistics portion of his credentials. Ultimately, their argument had settled on the fact that his rank was a non issue, Keith had surmised that it would only have made sense that Tharak had a rank like that if he was trying to destroy the EMP.

Pidge stalked down the hallway, thinking about the current situation. There wasn’t enough information. The EMP had still gone off despite Tharak’s apparent interference. Keith didn’t think there was any reason not to trust him, and she couldn’t bear to hear Allura agree with him.

Swallowing down the uncomfortable feeling bubbling up her throat, she decided to take things into her own hands.

Pidge entered the wing of the Castle of Lions where Team Voltron slept. From the main corridor, she took a left instead of a right, where she would have usually gone if she was returning to her room for the night. Her angry plodding became light feet on the floor as she crept towards her destination.

Two tentative knocks, followed by a third more forceful one, confirmed her suspicion. Keith wasn’t in. She assumed that he was with Kolivan, he had confided in her enough that she knew that he required a follow up injection. She suppressed a shudder, trying not to think of what that quite entailed for him, and pressed the door and willed it to open.

The screen on the side of the door flashed, and an Altean version of a lock icon blipped in and out of existence.

As Pidge questioned herself and her actions, she retrieved her hailer. When she pressed the screen with a finger, she found her palms were sweaty. Was she this nervous? She certainly didn’t feel nervous. She tried to remind herself that she was completely justifiable in her actions, even though she would never tolerate this kind of invasion of privacy from anyone of her peers.

With a quiet but positive tone, the lock screen shifted from red to blue, and the door slid open. Steeling herself, Pidge dove inside before anyone could catch her in the act of hacking into Keith’s room.

While she had frequented his quarters far more often now than she ever had been, Pidge always wondered about the lack of decor. Did Keith not feel at home here? If she didn’t know him, she would have suspected so. The walls were plain and the room was stark and as clinical as it had been when they had all first moved in. 

On the neatly made bed was Keith’s signature red jacket, along with his belt. It was uncharacteristic for him to not have the two on his person, but that was partially what Pidge was banking on. He wouldn’t need them when he was undergoing a partially surgical procedure.

Nervously, she observed his bed, and slid her hand under the mattress. She palmed around blindly until her hands wrapped around something cold. Out from under the bed she withdrew Keith’s blade of Marmora, the hilt uncovered and the symbol shining a soft blue. She took a deep breath.

She wasn’t a bad person, Pidge told herself as she exited the room, she was doing what was absolutely necessary. The dagger was in the big pocket of her sweatshirt, with her hands bunched in with it to make it seem less obvious that she had stolen something.

Since she was tiptoeing as quietly as humanly possible down the hallway, the sound of large, plodding footsteps made her freeze.

“Hey, Pidge!” exclaimed Hunk, doing a half-jog to catch up to her. Pidge turned, one of her hands wrapping around the hilt of the blade of Marmora.

“Hi, Hunk,” she returned, trying to keep her voice as even as possible.

“Wow,” said the Yellow Paladin, his eyes roaming over her person. She felt like her heart was going to stop. “You look really sweaty. Is everything okay?”

“Haha, yeah,” Pidge mumbled, looking down at the ground. She probably was, in all fairness, very sweaty. “I was um, sparring with Lance.”

“Oh, cool,” said Hunk. He looked momentarily away, and bit his lip in thought, as though he was going to ask a question he maybe shouldn’t ask. “Have you seen Tharak?”

“No,” Pidge nearly barked, her hand tightening on Keith’s dagger. Hunk seemed to flinch. “Why?”

“Well, Coran and I were doing some repairs, and I wanted to see what he knew. Because he’s an engineer and all, and Coran’s been asleep for 10,000 years. There’s probably some really awesome and efficient technology that we have no idea about,” Hunk explained, gesticulating, trying to portray the idea of advanced technology with his hands. It wasn’t working.

Pidge eyed him, her fear and nervousness melting away and being replaced with irritation. “We could probably find that stuff out on our own.”

Hunk nodded. “Maybe, but he’s here now, so,” he tried to continue, but the look on Pidge’s face told him he should stop. He cleared his throat, unsettled by Pidge’s steely gaze. “Anyway, if you see him, let him know I asked for him.”

“Sure,” she managed between her teeth, and Hunk took the gap in conversation as a cue to excuse himself. He shuffled down the hallway in the direction he had come, which allowed Pidge to keep walking to her destination. She released the blade from her grasp, and inspected her hand when she withdrew it from her pocket. She had been holding the blade so tightly that her palm was white with the lack of blood.

Down deep in the Castle of Lions, Pidge felt her nerves leave her. Instead, she was filled with a single-mindedness and determination which washed away her fears. In those darkly lit halls, she was half tempted to pull out the blade of Marmora and see the sigil glow. If Tharak’s quarters hadn’t been so close, she may have, but she came across his rooms quickly.

Pidge knocked on his door much like she had Keith’s. To her luck, there was no response, which made her wonder where he was. She didn’t spend too much time thinking about it, and got to work on opening the door, which only took a few deft swipes on her hailer. The Altean lock symbol blinked blue, and she was inside.

The last thing she wanted to do was be caught by Tharak of all people, so she quickly wiped the blade on her sweatshirt and placed it gently on the Galra’s desk. She knew she should have been out as soon as she was in, but she couldn’t help but look around.

The room was as sterile as Keith’s, but the lack of familiarity Pidge had with Tharak’s quarters made it feel even more empty. The engineer had come to the Castle of Lions with barely anything but the skin on his back, and that showed clearly.

Her hands lingered over a drawer in Tharak’s desk, and before she could tell herself not to, opened it. It was empty, but she decided it was a better place to hide the dagger than in plain sight on the desk, and swapped its position. 

She had pressed her luck enough just by being here. Overcome with the desire to vacate the premises immediately, Pidge silently made her way out of Tharak’s rooms and out into the dark hallway.

The halls were nearly pitch black. The giant window into space at the end of the corridor did little to aid her, the twinkling stars seeming to be the only source of light. She turned the corner, nearly in the clear, and bumped into someone much taller than her.

“Oof!” Pidge grunted, falling back onto her behind.

“Oh! Paladin!” exclaimed the last voice she wanted to hear. “Whoops, my bad. Need a hand?” Pidge could barely make out a slim and purple hand extended towards her.

“Thanks, but I’m fine,” Pidge huffed, pushing Tharak’s hand to the side. She hoisted herself up off the ground and dusted herself off.

Tharak could have been smiling or frowning, there was no way Pidge could tell. The only thing she could see were his shining yellow eyes. But by his voice, she supposed he wasn’t too angry that she had bumped into him. “Well, that’s good to hear.”

A pregnant pause passed between them before Tharak piped up, “Uh, what brings you down here?”

“I was…” Pidge trailed, finger on her chin. “Looking for you! Well, Hunk was. He wanted to pry your brain for some repairs on the ship.”

“I’m sure I could. That kind of stuff is my specialty,” continued Tharak confidently, and a little bit more relaxedly, Pidge noted. He looked down at the Green Paladin and sighed. “Look, I, uh, need to say some things to you.”

Pidge swallowed, feeling like the world was crashing down on her. “Yeah?”

Pidge swore she could see his ears folding down on his head. “I know you don’t like me, and you don’t have to like me. But I really do want to help,” he began quietly, folding his fingers together in front of him.

Pidge didn’t say anything, so Tharak continued. “I know I’ve been pushy, but I wouldn’t be unless I thought I could really help Keith. Since you didn’t want me helping with his lessons, I thought I’d do something else. So, I have something for you to give him.”

From a back pocket, Tharak retrieved his glasses. The yellow lense that had been shattered was fixed, and they seemed to give off a glow.

“You’re giving me your glasses...to give to Keith?” Pidge asked, accepting them regardless.

“In a way. Put them on,” Tharak said, motioning with his hands for Pidge to do so.

Pidge nudged off her glasses and donned Tharak’s. In the time she had taken to do so, Tharak had the tablet he had been using earlier out. On the screen was the word, ‘Hello!’ in bright red font.

“Uh,” Pidge started.

“Now put yours back on,” Tharak urged.

She did so, and looked up at the screen again. The bright red letters were still there, but this time they were a mix of the angry looking Galra characters that she had seen so many times during their raids.

“Quiznak, these are translators?” Pidge exclaimed, looking at the yellow glasses again with a newfound respect.

“Made them myself. Well, I reengineered an existing program. Can’t take all of the credit. I thought they would be useful, since I doubt Keith had the capacity or time to learn to fully read and comprehend a brand new language,” Tharak explained with a soft smile.

“These are perfect, Tharak. I--Keith will be so relieved. Thank you,” she breathed. As she looked closer at them, she could see that the glasses had an overlay of what looked like a pattern of hexagons. She couldn’t even begin to fathom what kind of technology went into something like that.

“Don’t thank me, please. It’s the least I could do,” Tharak mumbled, seeming sheepish. “Now, do you know where Hunk is? Gotta make a quick trip to my room, but after I’d really like to see what I could do for him.”

“He should be in the main engine room with Coran. You can follow a map on your tablet there,” Pidge whispered. Tharak was about to go into the room where she had hidden the blade of Marmora.

“Great! Thanks, Paladin,” Tharak said and gave her a quick nod of his head, a sign of respect that Pidge had seen in her readings. He passed by her and turned the corner.

“Tharak, wait!” said Pidge, nearly turning the corner with him. He was already a few feet ahead of her before he stopped in his tracks and turned his head.

“Yeah?” he asked, head cocked to the side.

Pidge bit her lip. One good action on Tharak’s part didn’t warrant anything. Just because he gave her these glasses didn’t mean he could be trusted. She felt torn, but she knew what she had to do.

She shook her head and sighed. “Uh, it’s nothing. Just, you don’t have to call me ‘Paladin’. You can call me Pidge.”

“Pidge,” repeated Tharak. His sharp and white teeth glittered in the starlight from the end of the corridor as he broke out into a smile. “See you later, Pidge.”

Pidge tried her best to smile in return.

“See you, Tharak.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We broke 30k! Exciting stuff. Thanks for reading!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unlucky chapter 13, where things get messy. Please heed the warning and the new tag.

The next few days passed in a feverish haze.

Keith breathed slowly in and out, each breath sending a new wave of agony racking through him. His eyes were glued to the ceiling, and his eyelids felt heavy and tacky.

Everything was too bright. The lights were off, but whenever he mustered the energy to move, sparks ran across his vision. His mind flashed to the hot purple glow of Shiro’s robotic arm, to the EMP aboard the barge, to the insidious yellow bloom of every single Galra’s horrible eyes.

At one point, Keith swore Pidge visited him. Through the pain and the bright daggers through his vision, he could see her silhouette, lights flickering dangerously off of her glasses. Her touch felt like needles, and her voice boomed when she spoke.

Her hand gripped his like a vice. She told him it was going to be okay.

Nothing felt like it was going to be okay. He felt like he was falling through the atmosphere of B-5862 in the cockpit of the red lion again, only this time the heat shield was deactivated, and he was being cooked from the inside out.

Tharak was the next to join him, or at least Keith thought it was Tharak. For a while, the Galra watched Keith from a corner of his room. The gentle glow of his eyes was the only indicator Keith had that someone was really there.

After what seemed like an eternity, Tharak came forward, slowly and calculatedly. He knelt at Keith’s side, but didn’t touch him. Instead, those yellow eyes bored into Keith’s own, and Tharak cocked his head.

Keith couldn’t quite discern the words that Tharak had said to him. Everything seemed to be happening too slowly, but too quickly for him to process anything. The Galra turned away from him for a brief moment, shrugged, and stood. He towered over Keith in a way the Red Paladin didn’t enjoy. It forced Keith to look up, and that made him nauseous. 

Tharak dismissed himself as he had come; silently. Then, with nothing to occupy Keith’s vacant, febrile mind, the itch started.

It began as mild irritation on his upper arms, his torso, his back, and through his feverish stupor he managed to rub his arms with the soft pads of his hands.

Soon, the methodical motion did nothing to soothe his crawling skin, and be began to use his claws to scratch. His claws drew thin lines across his upper arms that beaded red, and when that wasn’t enough, he began to shred, rending his skin into ribbons.

The shifting of his skin, too tight, and that pervasive itch coupled with the stinging of those long wounds caused tears to well up in his eyes. But with what little energy he had left, he choked them back. He was done crying, he was done feeling sorry for himself. 

This is what was happening. It was just a matter of acceptance.

Keith forced himself into an upright position, his back cracking in a way that didn’t sound entirely natural. He shrugged off the sheets with difficulty, some of the blood on his shoulders and arms having dried to it.

He felt for footing, and a shiver went through him when he touched the cold floor. He locked his knees, cradling his arms in his claws.

He let out a cough, thick and full of phlegm. He took his first steps, like a baby beginning to learn to walk. It felt like he was swimming, his legs and feet so far away. Was it ever going to stop? Or was this the new normal, plagued by a disease he didn’t quite understand?

Keith raised a bloody hand and wiped the sweat off of his brow. He wondered if he needed to make an appearance out of his room. He didn’t know how long he had been in this state. 

A deep sigh made its way out from his mouth. If Pidge said it was going to be okay, then it was going to be okay. No need to fret unless she said so. To whatever greater power was out there in this vast expanse of a universe, Keith made to it a silent prayer of thanks. Without Pidge, his cover would have been blown for sure.

He struggled to the bathroom, barely catching himself on the door handle. He fell heavily on his side, smearing blood on the white panelling. Grimacing, he shrugged open the door and entered the bathroom.

That familiar face was waiting for him in the mirror. The same one he had seen in Kolivan’s rooms, with those terrible eyes. He glowered at his own reflection, and the mirror snarled back, with jagged and broken teeth and malice. He hardly recognized himself.

With trembling hands, he turned the sink on, turning over his hands in the cold water. The faucet dribbled and the water splashed up pink. All the while, he was taunted by those yellow eyes and the purple that drew itself in tendrils up his face. 

His claws clicked against his teeth when he brought his palm upwards. Pain blossomed in his mouth as he grabbed one tooth and pulled it, and it came away easily with a wet pop. 

The canine dropped into the basin with a clink, and Keith retracted. Tentatively, he opened his mouth to assess the damage. From the gum, he could see a new canine coming through, white and sharp and moving. He felt dizzy.

He stabilized himself on the sink, his arms quivering with pain and something else he wasn’t ready to admit. He couldn’t hide what was happening here like he had before. Scenarios flashed through his mind, but only one sounded sound to him.

It was time for him to go.

He left the bathroom almost as soon as he had entered it, and stepped into his room. He brought a shirt up over his head, careful of the lacerations up and down his arms. He shrugged his jacket on after, his cuts stinging with the weight. 

Pidge’s words echoed in his head. He remembered her clearly, her eyes wide and angry, staring him down as he tried to explain himself. 

“There’s no room for the red lion in Galra space, Keith.”

Keith turned aside, as though she was right in front of him. “I’m sorry, Pidge,” he mumbled aloud, his words jumbled by the mess in his mouth. “I’ll be back, I promise. I would never abandon my...”

He found himself unable to finish the sentence. Instead, he retrieved his gauntlets, black and red and vicious. The claw tips of the gauntlets had a sinister obsidian curve, and they fit Keith just as well as his other gloves, if not moreso.

Leaning down, Keith parted the space between the bed and the frame with a careful hand. He checked once, but there was nothing under his bed. His heartbeat picked up. A second check, and his stomach dropped. A third, and the nausea left him and was replaced with a sick sense of fear.

He grabbed the bed now, his gauntlet claws sinking into the mattress. With a sweep of his arms, the bed flew off the frame. Surprised by his own strength, he looked down at his hands first, and then at the frame. There had been no metal clatter to the floor, and he expected the worst.

No knife.

There were very few material possessions that Keith valued, and he didn’t misplace them. He always had his knife on him, and when he didn’t, he stored it away for safekeeping under the mattress. He had left it when he had gone to visit Kolivan; he knew he didn’t want to be handling a weapon in that situation.

So where was it? He felt like he was a thousand miles away from himself, as though he was merely watching someone else frantically searching for their most valued possession. This wasn’t right, this couldn’t be him. He hardly recognized himself in the mirror, there was no way this could be him.

Keith stomped around his room, armored hand on his chin. He tried to retrace his steps as best he could, but none of his thoughts led to where he could have misplaced it.

Instead, he remembered, caught up in his feverish haze, Tharak leaning down to gaze upon him. Tharak, turning away from Keith before leaving, no, before slinking away from him. Keith felt the pinpricks of his obsidian claws in his palm as he tightened his hand into a fist. 

He was out the door in an instant, barely waiting for it to slide open for him. He took long strides, but didn’t run. His boots clacked on the floor as he angrily stomped towards the lower levels.

He was going to find Tharak, take back the knife and maybe use it a few times on him for good measure. And then he was going to find Shiro, and everything would be fine. His vision blurred. The Castle’s lights gleamed angrily at him. 

Everything would be like it had been before. Everything would be okay and there would be nothing to worry about again.

Keith stepped past the living room, the communal hang-out space where they all had spent many nights. Lance was stretched out on the circular couch, a long leg propped up on one of the footrests. He seemed preoccupied with something, but when Keith stole a look at him, their eyes met, and Lance blanched.

Keith turned away, but Lance shouted something that he didn’t want to hear. He trudged onward through the hallway, only stopping when a firm hand clapped him roughly on the shoulder.

“Keith!” Lance yelled. He didn’t want to turn around, but Lance was moving him. “A-are you okay?”

“Lance,” Keith breathed carefully. “Let go of me.”

“You’re,” Lance began, tripping up his words. The lack of response to his request led Keith to reach for Lance’s hand with his claws, but the Blue Paladin sharply retracted his arm.

“I’m?” Keith dared him. His mouth felt like it was full of cotton.

This was a far cry from when they had all exchanged open embraces on Sector Alpha, but Keith didn’t have time to be sympathetic. Nothing felt real. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was talking to Lance. When his mouth moved, he barely felt himself moving it. All he felt was fever. He needed his knife.

“I’m sorry,” Keith continued, his face composed and neutral, revealing nothing. “I should have told you sooner.”

“Told me…” Lance mumbled, eyes glued to Keith’s face. Suddenly, his own face quivered and contorted, and then he was yelling. “What is going on?! You need to tell me that now! What’s happening to you?”

Keith needed his knife, now. “Sit down, Lance. I’ll explain everything when I get back.”

“No, no!” Lance began, trying to grab Keith’s shoulders. The Red Paladin deftly dodged, skirting to the side. “You need to tell me what’s going on right now. With your face. Quiznak, with everything!”

“Don’t do this, Lance,” Keith warned, and he could see his friend’s resolve wavering.

Lance narrowed his eyes. “Is this why you were sick all the time? Did you think you couldn’t tell us?”

“I don’t want to get into this right now. I have things to do,” Keith bit back, with what he thought was enough venom to repel Lance. He turned away.

When he felt Lance’s hand on his back again, Keith snatched it, twirling himself around so that the Blue Paladin’s arm was twisted in an unnatural way. Lance made a noise that Keith could only describe as a yelp, and somewhere he felt a part of him snap.

“Are you going to let me go?” asked Keith calmly.

“Tell me where you’re going,” whispered Lance too quickly, hand shaking in Keith’s grasp.

“Are you afraid of me?” Keith rebutted. 

Lance’s blue eyes met Keith’s yellow, and with a grunt, Lance tried to force Keith back. But the Red Paladin was stronger, and Keith took Lance with him. There was a burning feeling in Keith’s gut, a bubbling fire that threatened to boil over. It raced up his throat, and sputtered out in a guttural growl as he looked his friend in the eyes.

His claws sank into Lance’s skin, and then he twisted.

Keith heard the breaking of bone as he snapped Lance’s arm, and then he turned away as the Blue Paladin screamed. The shrill shriek shook him out of whatever trance he had been in, and he retracted. He drew a hand over his mouth and closed his eyes, horrified by what he had just done.

“I’m sorry,” Keith whispered, head downcast, hearing Lance spit expletives at him through his mangled cries of pain.

Keith could still hear Lance shout as he left the Blue Paladin alone to tend to the wound he had inflicted upon him. Those weren’t the most amicable terms to leave on, but he supposed there was nothing to be done about it. 

He wasn’t sure if he could look at Lance again any time soon.

When Keith arrived in the lower levels, everything was quiet. It seemed a long way away from Lance’s swearing and noises of pain and discomfort. Everything was pleasantly dark as well, and he found himself being able to open his eyes fully. Had he been squinting the whole time?

He floated through the lower halls, as though he was in a dream. He could have been standing at the entrance to Tharak’s rooms for seconds or hours, for all he knew. 

Carefully, he drew up his hand and knocked on the door, the gauntlet making a clanging noise on the metal.

When the door slid open for him, it revealed Tharak, engrossed with his tablet, sitting on his chair, which was scooted in nearly completely into the desk. The Galra turned and flicked his ear. His nostrils flared as though he was scenting the air. 

“Keith? You okay?” Tharak asked, getting up from his chair. “I smell blood.”

“No,” Keith admitted, closing the distance between them in two or three long strides. He grabbed Tharak by the collar of his shirt, and slammed him into the wall. The glasses on his face rattled.

“Keith?!” Tharak yelped, clawing at the gauntlets but finding no purchase.

“Where’s my knife, Tharak?” asked Keith, his voice level but his arms shaking as he held up the Galra. 

“Y-your knife? Let go of me! I don’t know!” Tharak yelled as he squirmed in Keith’s grasp, but it was like steel.

“I’m going to ask you again,” Keith said through his teeth, his voice gravelly and deep. He dragged Tharak across the wall and flung him into the corner of the room, where he landed with a thud. Keith’s chest heaved abnormally quickly.

Tharak adjusted his glasses, obviously trying his best to remain calm. “Keith, this isn’t you. You’re being temperamental.”

Keith approached him, and Tharak seemed to ball up in his corner.

“This is what happens! Didn’t Kolivan say anything? You need to go back to your room, you need to--” Tharak tried to explain, but Keith was on him. He sank his claws into Tharak’s shoulders, and the Galra screamed.

“I don’t know where your knife is!” Tharak pleaded between sobs, shaking his head furiously.

Keith felt like there was lava coursing through his veins. Everything was going to be okay when he had his knife. He retracted one of his claws, which made a horrible squelching noise as it left its place of purchase, and placed it carefully over Tharak’s face.

“Keith, stop this at once!”

Keith craned his neck to look back. Standing at the door entrance was not only Allura, but Pidge and Lance as well. Pidge looked nervous, and Lance, whose face was red and puffy, looked hurt in more ways than one. His right arm dangled limply and was braced against his torso by his other arm.

Allura looked as regal as ever, with her hair pulled back tightly in that white bun. She strode forward fearlessly, looking about as menacing as Keith had when he had walked into Tharak’s room.

“Step away from him,” the Princess ordered. Her eyes were unwavering and her mouth was turned down in a hard frown.

In response, Keith pressed his claws against Tharak. “He took my knife,” was all he could manage. The room was getting hot.

“Get away from Tharak, Keith,” Allura tried again, more forceful this time. Keith hunched down and glowered at her.

Pidge entered the room, keeping her distance between both Keith and Allura. She edged past them both, heading for the desk. She opened the drawer that she had closed only a few days before, and drew out the blade of Marmora. 

“He didn’t take it, Keith,” Pidge whispered, holding up the shining metal blade. “I did.”

Keith turned to her, yellow eyes wide but heavy with fever. He was crouched over Tharak still, with his hand and that vicious gauntlet outstretched over the entirety of the Galra’s face.

Pidge’s voice quivered and her hand shook when she spoke. “I wanted to… I didn’t want him in the Castle. So I took your knife, and hid it here. I didn’t think you would hurt him, not like this. Quiznak, Keith, what’s gotten into you?!”

Pidge watched as Keith rose from his position, towering over everyone. When she took a cautious step back, he took a step forward.

“Keith, don’t you dare come any closer to her!” Allura shouted, her fists clenching.

Keith watched as two more blurry silhouettes filtered into the room. One was big and yellow, and the other was tall and slender. He grimaced in confusion, and felt the world spin around him. The only thing he saw, the only thing that made sense, was Pidge and the knife.

“Give it to me,” Keith demanded sharply. He took another step towards the Green Paladin.

“I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that,” Pidge responded carefully, backing up again. Why was she so far away from him?

Keith reached out for the knife. “Give it to me,” he repeated. He needed it for something, he was sure of it. He felt like he was losing distance as he was gaining on her.

“I can’t,” spat the girl, whoever she was, withholding whatever she had in her hands from him. The hot, bubbling feeling made its way through Keith’s throat again, and he was powerless to stop it.

A cacophony of muddy voices shouted as he launched himself at the figure in front of him.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A segue chapter. Originally it was going to be a part of a mega-chapter like chapter 9, but I have a feeling the next chapter will be big enough on its own.

Everything hurt.

Keith’s eyes cracked open and his muscles groaned in protest. His surroundings were tinged a dark blue, and everything looked hazy and opaque, as though he was looking through frosted glass.

He tried to move forward, but he was fastened firmly to a cold metal slab that pressed against his back. He managed to wiggle his fingers with more success, but his arms refused to cooperate with him.

A groan escaped his lips, and he let his head drop. His thoughts were jumbled, and he couldn’t make sense of anything. He remembered being sick, being consumed with fever, but a thick fog negated everything else. His head throbbed with every tiny movement, as though someone had hit him with a baseball bat a few hours earlier.

With his eyes downcast, he saw his feet, manacled and bound to the wall. He tried to kick out, but the restraints were strong and made of a dark metal, and no amount of force could break them.

Where was he?

He looked out of the glass. Fuzzy lights glowed distortedly into his prison. There was a person in front of him, her delicate hands folded in front of her, her white suit stark against the blue. When she looked up at him, he swore he could hear her earrings jingle with the motion.

“Allura?” Keith asked, his throat sore and his voice foreign.

“Good morning, Keith,” said Allura. Her voice was even but strained.

“Princess…where,” he began, trying to move his arms. The manacles rattled against his protest.

“Cryostasis chamber,” the Princess provided, answering his unasked question. She grabbed one of her hands with the other and squeezed. “You have been out for some time.”

“Why?” Keith demanded, struggling against the restrains fruitlessly. He felt his muscles burn with exertion, but the binds didn’t move an inch. “Let me out.”

“I do not think you are in a position to be making demands,” Allura snapped, her voice trembling. She unfolded her hands and placed them at her side, and clenched her fists.

“I…I don’t understand,” Keith admitted, brows furrowing. He slumped, but the restraints didn’t yield. In fact, he was held fast, suspended vertically behind a curved glass panel.

“I have relieved Kolivan of his duties on the Castle of Lions,” the Princess continued, trying her best to meet his eyes.

Keith’s heart hammered in his chest. A shiver ran down his spine. An image of Kolivan with a glowing yellow syringe flashed through his mind, and he involuntarily squirmed. “It’s not,” he stuttered. “It’s not his fault. It’s mine.”

“I disagree. He would, and will, be of more use back with the Blade of Marmora. The Galra need his leadership,” Allura countered. “And apparently, my people need mine.”

“You can’t just tell him to go,” Keith argued, angry now. “He fought with you against Haggar. He lost Antok. He’s done so much for you!”

The Princess just stared at him, her mouth pressed into a tight line.

“You can’t just dismiss him because he was helping me,” Keith spat, thrashing around in the chamber. He glared at Allura, fighting to keep himself from snarling. “If he wasn’t Galra, you wouldn’t make him leave.”

Allura closed her eyes. She sucked in a breath sharply. “Keith, you misunderstand me.”

Keith all but growled. “I understand you perfectly, Princess. You hate them. You hate me, now, too. You hate me so much you don’t even want to look at me.”

“No,” she whispered back, trying to keep herself composed. “I hate deceit.”

Keith blinked.

Allura continued, who was getting frustrated in kind. “I hate underhandedness. I hate having lost my home, my solar system, to our closest allies whom we trusted. I hate looking at the Galra and not seeing a people, but instead seeing a betrayal that has led to 10,000 years of turmoil. I hate it when you lie to everyone for your own convenience.”

Keith breathed slowly. Allura opened her eyes and her gaze was unwavering.

“And Kolivan, not as a Galra, but as someone who was willing to help you endanger yourself and others right under our noses, is no longer welcome on the Castle of Lions,” she said finally. When she spoke again, her voice was dripping with acid and dark. “Forgive me if I am wary of deception and lies. I am still recovering.”

Keith tried his best to let Allura’s words wash over him easily, but he found himself drowning in them. “I’m sorry, I didn’t--”

“No. You are not sorry. Save your words,” said the Princess miserably, as though she was pleading with him.

Keith closed his mouth and thought carefully about what to say next. Instead of arguing, he only asked, “So. What now?” It was gruff and blunt, but he needed to know. 

“I have not decided yet,” answered Allura. “You need time to think about what you have done, and I am willing to give you that time. When you have come to terms with your actions, let me know.”

With that, Allura turned away. Keith craned his neck so he could watch her leave, but his range of sight in the chamber was limited.

“Allura, wait!” Keith called, straining against the binds.

There was no reply, only the sound of retreating footsteps echoing off the Castle walls.

His breath came out in white puffs in front of him as he felt the the air go cold. The blue glass in front of him frosted and crackled. He twisted against the restraints, smashing his head backwards into the metal. The cold and the ice bit into him, grappling him into submission.

He closed his eyes, and his world went dark.

\---

Pidge was crying.

She hadn’t let herself do so, not in a while at least. There were only a few times in her journey through space where she had succumbed to tears. When Shiro told her that he had attacked Matt, she had cried. She had cried time and again for her family and kept on crying because she missed them so much.

And now, she was crying because she was scared, and it was all her fault.

The tears rolled hot and heavy down her face, and she sniffled. She brought a sleeve up towards her face, careful of the bandages that were wound around her head. Her right cheek stung, salty tears wetting the gauze and seeping through to the cuts beneath.

Pidge dried her eyes and reached to pull up the covers on her bed. She didn’t want to face the day, she wasn’t ready to. The events of the previous day replayed in her head over and over, a loop from which there was no escape.

“I can’t,” she had hissed savagely at Keith, his knife pressed tightly to her chest, shaking her head furiously. 

Keith had been in a deep crouch, like a predator waiting for its prey. A splatter of dark purple crawled up his neck like veins, branching out over his face. His yellow eyes were wide but hyperfocused. When he opened his mouth, a string of ropy, bloody saliva hung from a sharp upper tooth. The last thing Pidge wanted to do was call it a fang.

He let out a horrible noise, a strangled sound caught between a growl and a cry. She could see his muscles tense and his body wind up like a spring.

And then he pounced.

Keith barrelled into her with such force that she was immediately knocked off her feet. He fell on top of her and slashed, and slashed, and slashed. She could feel the cold pinpricks of Keith’s claws against her forehead, and the blistering, stinging pain that followed. She tried to raise her hands to defend herself, but she was effectively pinned.

Pidge screamed, and Keith roared as he tore into her. Her eyes were closed, but his claws raked against her in such a way that she was sure she would lose the both of them.

A body collided heavily with them both, sending Keith sprawling to her side. Pidge wasted no time in rolling out of the way. Through the blood dripping over her eyebrows and into her eyes, she watched Hunk gather up Keith, squirming and shrieking, in his arms and pile drive him into the ground.

Keith sucked in a breath of air and let out a pained groan so loudly that even in her distressed state, Pidge could hear it clearly. Hunk grappled with him, careful of the claws, and slammed him into the floor.

“Sorry, buddy,” Pidge heard Hunk say as he grabbed Keith’s head with a large hand and bashed him against the wall. Keith’s claws skittered across the floor, desperate for purchase as he was drawn upwards. There was an audible crack as the Red Paladin’s head hit the wall for a second time, and then silence. Keith went limp almost immediately, sinking to the floor in a crumpled heap. Hunk’s chest heaved as he exhaled furiously, looking down at what had become of his friend.

Pidge could hear people calling for her, but it seemed distant. Everything stung, like she had taken one hundred knives to the face, and it hurt so bad she wasn’t sure if she could process it.

It still hurt now, even as she reached over for her hailer on her bedside table. She idly traced around the bandages on her cheek, wincing as she brushed over a particularly sensitive spot.

There was a knock on her door, and even though she didn’t want to speak to anyone ever again, in her clearest and strongest voice she said, “Come in.”

She expected Hunk, maybe Lance, maybe even Allura to be the one at the door, to scold her if anything else. But who waltzed through those doors was none of the above. It was a heavily bandaged Tharak who passed the threshold to into her rooms.

There was a sour taste in the back of her throat, and she tried to deny the feelings of guilt that followed. Tharak was wearing a shirt that was bulging with gauze pads beneath it around the shoulders, complete with medical tape that bound everything in place. He seemed to have trouble moving, and walked towards her as stiffly. She said nothing to him.

“Us sick birds should stick together, yeah?” Tharak asked, breaking the silence when it was obvious she wasn't going to. Despite his injured appearance, her gave her a big, toothy smile. He pulled up a chair and sat by her bedside, and folded his arms across his chest.

“I owe you an apology,” Pidge finally forced out. Tharak’s ears folded back against his head.

“Oh,” he mumbled, taken aback. “I guess you do. Don’t sweat it.”

Pidge looked at him, searching for signs of insincerity. She found it hard enough to read other human faces. Alien expressions were far beyond her area of expertise. His easy smile gave away nothing.

Tharak looked right back at her, one furry eyebrow raised. “Uh. Yeah, well. I didn’t take it personally or anything. I got in your space. I tread over you a little bit, didn’t I? I mean, I’m going to be out of here soon, anyway. So you win.”

His words confused her. “Wait, what? What do you mean?” she asked. 

He laughed and shook his head. “Kolivan? Was his name Kolivan? I never actually spoke to him. He’s out. So I guess that’s my cue.”

“But you have nowhere else to go,” Pidge mumbled miserably. An enemy of the Empire, and a Galra no less, cast out into space with nary a hope for survival. She didn’t want to think about it.

“You were fine with that a few days ago, apparently,” Tharak injected. Pidge winced.

“I apologized to you for hiding the knife in your room. I’m not going to apologize for not trusting you. I’m justified in my reasoning,” she countered, but there was no heat behind her words. She found herself contemplating what she had done.

Pidge was more than sorry about the knife. She realized she could not have foreseen the circumstances that had landed Keith in cryostasis, but she couldn’t help but feel responsible. Every time her hands went to her face, she remembered that she had played an active role in this whole mess.

Hunk would tell her it wasn’t her fault. But Lance, with his broken arm, she wasn’t sure would feel the same way. She felt disappointed in herself more than anything else, and that was what stung the most, more than any of the lacerations all across her face.

She reached over to her bedside table again, and opened a drawer. Out from it she retrieved the yellow glasses that Tharak had given her only a few days prior. Her fingers traced the rim delicately, and in the sterile lighting she could see the hexagonal patterns in the lenses.

“I know you gave them to me so I could give them to Keith,” Pidge started, turning the glasses over. “But I think you should give them to him.”

“He’s not going anywhere anytime soon, I don’t think. I don’t think any of us are. Well, except for me,” replied Tharak honestly, complete with a little shrug. He seemed distant, despite his lightheartedness. “So he doesn’t need them.”

Pidge still held them out. “At this point I think it’s more symbolic than anything.” She bit her lip. “I wanted to give them to him, but I don’t think he should see me right now.”

“Probably not. You’re going to have some great scars, though,” Tharak said a little too positively, plucking the glasses out of her hands in a quick motion. He folded them down and tucked them into his shirt, careful of the bandages.

The subsequent silence dragged on far longer than Pidge was comfortable with. “I’m going to get some rest. It was...nice of you to come by,” she said with a cough, trying to sound sincere but failing magnificently. 

Tharak nodded, taking the hint. He stood up from his seat, his hand ghosting over the yellow glasses. “I’ll be sure to give these to him. There are just a few things I need to take care of first.”

“Yeah?” Pidge asked, catching Tharak at the doorway.

He had his back to her, but he tilted his head just so. Pidge could see a sliver of a yellow eye and a smile. “Yep. Don’t sleep too long, now. You don’t want to miss anything.”

Before she could press, the Galra was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking so long and leaving that cliffhanger. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy! School's been rough and I'm drowning in research projects, but you guys have been great and I love the feedback. Your comments and kudos, especially on chapter 13, have absolutely fueled this story. Stay tuned, by the way, and fasten your seat belts.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mega-chapter incoming. Impact in t-minus one mouse scroll. Collision imminent!

Keith awoke to the sound of sirens. 

The binds retracted and he fell silently and gracefully to the ground. The blue glass retreated back into the wall, the cold air billowing out of the chamber like smoke.

The walls were lit up red, and emergency lights flashed in the distance on either side of the corridor. Everything was eerily empty, but the alarms were blaringly loud, and it took all of his willpower for him not to cover his ears.

Keith had no idea how long he had been out. His world had stopped when Allura had resealed the cryostasis chamber with him inside it. If the way he was feeling was any indication of the time he had spent in the pod, then it was a while. He felt refreshed; aching pains of exertion, nausea, and fever seemed to escape him.

“Hello?” Keith called, hopeful. The only response he received was the angry noise of the alarms.

The Castle of Lions shook. The sound reverberated off the walls, and the motion nearly knocked Keith off his feet. He clung to a nearby wall, claws scratching on the metal. A panel opened up to his right, Altean script flashing at him in warning.

He couldn’t read what it said, but he surmised that it was nothing good. This time, the second tremor was preceded by an earth-shattering boom. A rush of hot wind blew through the corridor, his hair flying into his face. With his elbows to the wall, he tried to steady his breathing.

There was only one way to find out what was going on.

Keith knew the way to the command center all too well. Even through the twists and turns of the Castle, now lit up bright red and noisy, he was able to navigate with relative ease. He trudged through the corridors, trying to keep his stride even and not falter. Every now and then, the Castle rumbled, and Keith locked his knees to keep himself from falling.

He wiped the sweat off of his brow. This was a far cry from the deathly cold of the cryostasis chamber. Everything was hot, and this time, he was certain it wasn’t fever. The air around him seemed to tremble in the distance, and the fact that everything was tinged red reminded him of fire.

Keith assumed that the emergency release had been triggered on the cryostasis chamber. While it meant he was free, it also meant that the Castle was in evacuation mode, something that he never thought was going to happen. The Castle of Lions had been tried again and again, against the Galra imperial fleets. Nothing had been able to scour through the exterior, and not even the corrupted Balmera crystal could take it down.

The Castle groaned.

The air was acrid in Keith’s mouth. He didn’t see any smoke at first, but it was hard to mistake the smell. The scent of burning machinery, the bitterness of electricity; it made him put a hand over his face.

When he turned the corner there was a dead end. Frowning in confusion, he tried to retrace his steps. He had taken a right, and then a left, and had stopped at the third hallway to the right. There should have been a corridor here, with an elevator on the right. 

Sweat ran in rivulets down his face and he sucked in a breath, trying to ignore the taste of hot rubber. Why was it so hot? Was there a fire somewhere? 

He looked at the wall that stopped him from progressing. Gingerly, he held out a hand, fingers splaying as he neared the wall. He could feel the heat emanating off of the metal. When he pressed further, the it was too hot for him to be that close.

The emergency evacuation procedures had been triggered, and this portion of the Castle had been sectioned off for a reason, most likely an internal fire. Compartmentalization was a key component in terms of safety precautions, he presumed. 

Except the only thing it reminded him of now was the Titanic, but more hot.

Keith supposed that the only way up through the Castle to the command center was manually. He needed to find the others and regroup, debrief, and find a way to rectify the situation. He would swallow his pride for now, and admit his mistakes later, but the safety of his team was of the utmost priority.

On an upper portion of the wall to his right was a ventilation shaft. It seemed a little bit out of his reach, so he retreated towards the other side of the corridor, bending his knees in preparation.

He got a running start and instead of jumping, he leaped onto the ventilation shaft. His claws hooked around the grill of the duct and creaked with his weight. He hoisted himself up, scrambling on the smooth wall, and stuck an arm in as he ripped the grill off of the shaft.

His claws scratched the thin metal inside of the duct as he hoisted himself inside. He assumed it would be dark in the shaft, but everything was as clear as day, if a little bit smoky. He did, however, have more trouble fitting through the vent than he thought he would, and bumped his head on the ceiling.

With a small ‘oof!’ noise, he tucked his long legs into the vent, wondering how exactly he was going to get to the command center from a ventilation shaft of all things.

There was an earsplitting sound of rending metal, followed by a bright flash of light. Keith winced, shielding himself from the noise. He cracked open one eye, and twisted himself around in the shaft so that he could poke his head out of the duct.

When he did so, he found himself face to face with a column of raging flame.

Keith threw himself back into the shaft, pushing with all his might. The fire roared past him, heat blistering his skin. Bright red light licked at his vision, and he scrambled deeper into the vent to avoid the flames. He needed to find the others, fast.

This wasn’t like the Titanic at all. This was the goddamn Hindenberg.

While it was hot in the ducts, it wasn’t as though everything was on fire, which was a definite plus. It was times like these, though not very frequent, where he wished he had cut his hair short. It fell in messy black clumps over his eyes, drenched in sweat, and he kept having to brush it back as he made his way through the duct.

He clambered up the shaft when it jutted upwards at a right angle. It took a while for him to position himself so he could move up, but once he did it was easy going. His muscles only protested slightly during his ascent, and he was astounded at how good he felt. 

The second level of the shaft he reached was cooler in temperature, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He shuffled down the shaft until he reached another duct, and bent his knees back. He gave the grill a forceful kick and it popped off with a clang.

The grill clattered on the side of the chamber, but Keith didn’t hear it fall. Carefully, he poked his head out of the duct for a second time, a bit more tentatively since previously he had been about a hair’s length away from being burned alive.

The elevator shaft was dark save for the red emergency lights that ran across each side. He clutched a side of the ventilation duct with a claw and scooted himself out so that his legs were dangling over the abyss. 

Keith was vaguely reminded of the time he and Lance had tried to get to the pool by climbing through the elevator shaft. Only this time, Lance wasn’t there, and it would be distinctly harder to crawl through without a partner. Also the Castle was on fire. He sighed.

There walls were made up of separate sheets of metal and welded together with a separate strip that jutted out slightly from the rest of the wall. While not ideal, he supposed he would have to use those for handholds. 

Keith swung out with his right hand first and managed to get a grip on the wall. He teetered over the edge, and was strung out on his tiptoes against the shaft. His cheek was firmly pressed to the wall. 

His ascent this time was slightly more difficult than it had been through the duct. With the ventilation shaft, it had been far too cramped. With the elevator shaft, there was far too much space. He found himself having to stretch to reach handholds, and even with his newfound strength his heart was hammering from exertion and nerves.

He bent his knees and forced himself upward, propelling himself towards the next handhold. His claws clattered across the metal in a way that would suggest that he wouldn’t be able to find purchase, and he felt himself slide backwards. His stomach dropped in fear, and he voluntarily looked back towards the black abyss below him. Luckily, as he desperately grasped at the wall for a grip, he found it and he stook fast to it. He exhaled in relief.

The Castle rumbled and pitched. Keith was flung across the shaft onto the other wall, slamming his back against the metal. He made a pained noise and reached out, grasping air. He wasn’t that knowledgeable when it came to spacecraft assembly; he was a pilot, not a mechanic, but he knew the general basics of what caused the Castle of Lions to stay oriented. Was the gyroscope failing, or even broken? When would the artificial gravity cut out?

When would the oxygen?

Keith tumbled about like clothes in a dryer as the Castle’s insides rattled. A steel beam that had unhinged itself from somewhere below came flying at him at full speed and it narrowly missed him. There was the sound of tearing and scraping as the Castle attempted to right itself.

When the Castle returned to its original orientation, Keith plummeted down the shaft.

\---

Pidge screamed as one of the primary engines exploded.

This was the third explosion of the day. The first had happened in the early morning, before any of them had been awake. Allura had called them all to the command center to assess the situation.

The doors to the command center had shuttered open, not as smoothly as Pidge would have hoped. The wide, open skylights blazed brightly with stars and far-off planets.

At the helm was Allura, her back to everyone. She looked like she was shaking. Coran was at her side, talking a mile a minute, gesticulating wildly at the ship and then at vast expanse of space.

“The Castle has sustained internal damage!” Coran had explained. He brought up a holographic layout of the Castle of Lions. While the diagram itself was blue, little red blips dotted around the center and aft of the ship, where the power system was located. “The Balmera crystal and the generator system attached has been jeopardized. According to my diagnostics, it looks as though the entire mechanism was remotely detonated!”

“Detonated?” asked Lance, hand carefully resting on the cast that took up the rest of his other arm.

“Detonated! As in, boom!” Coran provided with his arms in a wide-arc. Allura made a face.

“He knows what detonation entails, Coran,” said the Princess curtly. “That is not our only problem. Not to long ago, we received a ping from a Galra warship, indicating that it has entered within our space.”

Pidge took in a breath. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

Allura looked away. Her face betrayed her emotions. “No. I am afraid we have to assume the worst. If we cannot stabilize the ship, then we cannot warp or activate the particle barrier. The Galra will have us cornered.”

“So what can we do?” Hunk chimed in, folding his arms across his chest. There was a quiet grumble from the heart of the ship.

“I need you and Pidge to contain the explosion and clean up the damage so I can warp us out of here,” the Princess explained, her hands folded together. “Repair the ship and return here, preferably before the Galra have us at gunpoint.”

That was when the second explosion had gone off. It had rocked the entire ship, throwing Pidge off balance. She fell heavily on her side, taking in the sight of Allura clinging to the helm and Hunk keeping Lance balanced with difficulty.

Pidge had anticipated a third explosion. But she hadn’t thought it would be this close to her face.

She felt Hunk throw his arms around her as the fire enveloped them both, which wrenched her from her thoughts and brought her back into reality. She could hear Hunk grunt in pain as the flames licked at their skin. They both fell to the ground in a heavy clatter of armor.

“Thank Quiznak we decided to leave that room!” Hunk said from on top of her, his voice loud in her ear but muffled by his helmet, which had shuttered itself during the explosion.

“You can get off now,” Pidge mumbled, pushing the Yellow Paladin with a tiny arm. He got up quickly and brushed off the soot. “Let’s assess the damage.”

Pidge forced herself up onto her feet. The primary engine room was less of a room and more of an extremely long chamber. The only thing she could see from her vantage point were columns of hot orange flame. Smoke began to filter in through the engine room, turning the ceiling a dismal gray. Indicator screens popped up on the machines, with lines and lines of Altean script and various symbols of warning.

The Castle rumbled and tilted, and both she and Hunk activated the artificial gravity mechanism in their boots. Pieces of debris dropped out of the engine room, some a little too big for Pidge’s liking. One piece of metal looked particularly integral to the entire generator mechanism; she recognized something like it from the Garrison, albeit this was an incredibly advanced version of whatever she had previously dealt with.

“I don’t think we can repair that,” Hunk muttered gravely, fingers tapping on the glass of his helmet. He steadied himself and seemed to hesitate as he brought up his hailer, but reasoned with himself before he spoke. “I’m going to send the diagnostics to the Princess.”

It only took a few seconds for Hunk to compile the data for transfer. It arrived to the command in even less, and a holographic panel materialized before Hunk’s hailer. Allura looked stern, and the hologram blipped in and out in lines causing her image to be distorted. She looked at them both, a frown cut deep into her face.

“I’m initiating evacuation procedures. Get to your lions.”

\---

The world dropped fast before his eyes.

He flailed and screamed as he fell. The red warning lights that illuminated the shaft turned into a red, angry streak in his vision. He reached out to the wall, hands slipping on the surface and doing nothing to slow his ascent.

He looked down, eyes wide. Seeing what was before him and thinking that there was no other option, he extended both of his arms out to the opposite side of the wall. His hands closed around a metal beam that had torn itself out from inside of the wall and was now jutting outwards.

His fingers and shoulders cracked as he caught the weight of his body. The noise he made sound strained, and he closed his eyes. He felt as though his shoulders had just been pulled from their sockets, and he was amazed that he had the strength to still be able to hold himself up. In the back of his mind, he knew that wasn’t quite possible for a human, but he didn’t want to admit that.

As Keith surveyed his surroundings, he realized he wasn’t all that far from the ground. He swallowed uncomfortably. Had he stalled for maybe even a few seconds more, he may have ended up nothing but a stain in the Castle’s elevator shaft.

He dropped down silently on the pads of his feet and rolled out his shoulders. One cracked once, twice, and then back into place. The other he massaged out until he was sure he would only feel it for the next two weeks.

What he had dropped down upon was the elevator. Or at least, what remained of it. It had crumpled like a soda can and was nestled in the confines of its shaft. The doors had been smashed as well, so that the shaft was wide open and led out into the corridor below.

Keith slid through the entryway and into the corridor. He placed both feet firmly on the flat ground, relieved. He would find another way to get to the command center, some way that didn’t involve climbing through shafts that definitely weren’t meant to be climbed in.

He recognized where he was. The lower floors of the Castle were dimly lit, as always, but there was a blipping red warning light that flashed periodically overhead. Nothing was hot here, which meant that whatever had happened to the Castle had happened in its relative center, and there was only one thing that was there of note; the Balmera crystal.

The dark of the corridors didn’t bother him as much as it did before, and he supposed he was thankful for that. The next best course of action would be to get to the hangar and survey the exterior damage; somehow gauge what was wrong with the Castle of Lions with a different perspective. Keith wondered if it would be as hard traveling to the aft of the Castle as it had been to get to the bottom.

“Keith!” called a distressed voice from the end of the hall.

Keith turned. Running up to him was a very panicked looking Tharak, who was halfway through a worried step in his half-jog when he stopped. 

“Tharak,” Keith said, surprised at the astonishment in his own voice. Memories flashed behind his eyes; his purple claws sinking into Tharak’s shoulders, Tharak screaming, the sound of his voice as he roared. He suppressed a shudder. He wanted desperately to apologize, but all he could do was look straight ahead.

The Galra heaved a sigh of relief, but when Keith just gave him a blank and vacant stare, he looked perplex. “Keith? Wow, nice face.”

The red flashing lights jolted Keith back to the current situation, and he decided to ignore Tharak’s observation. He didn’t even want to know how he looked right now. “The Castle’s in jeopardy.”

“Yeah. Looks like the generators exploded,” Tharak commented too lightly. He pulled something out of his armor; Keith only now realized that Tharak was wearing the armor that they had pilfered together from the armory at Sector Alpha. “Pidge wanted you to have these. I guess the timing could have been better, but I promised her I’d give you them.”

Keith walked up to Tharak and received a pair of yellow glasses. “Aren’t these yours?” he asked, brows furrowing in confusion.

“They were. I got new ones,” Tharak affirmed, making a point of fixing the glasses on the bridge of his feline nose. “I’ve modified these. They’re a translating device, so you didn’t have to learn how to read our script. Not much use now but, nifty, right?”

Keith was looking at the glasses. “Yeah, I guess so--” A glint of silver flashed at the edge of his vision, and he was halfway through taking a step backwards when hot pain blossomed in his shoulder. A yell ripped itself from his throat and he backed up from away from Tharak, barely able to keep a hold of the lenses.

“And I also have this,” Tharak said, twirling Keith’s knife deftly through his fingers. Blood dripped bright red off of the blade, flicking everywhere. “But I don’t want to give it to you.”

Blood pounded in Keith’s ears as he reached for his upper arm. He could feel the deep wound that the knife had left in his skin, stinging and smarting. He tried to move his right arm and was met with protest from his shoulder. The insertion point was only a few inches away from his neck. “Tharak, what--”

“Save it,” Tharak hushed him, tapping a claw against Keith’s blade. “You know, I expected a lot of things when I boarded the Castle of Lions. Some half-breed undergoing quintessence therapy wasn’t one of them, but it worked out well for me.”

Keith glowered at him, hand affixed to his wounded shoulder.

Tharak continued. “Pidge helped my case the most, hiding your knife. She forgot it in my room during the combined effort to attempt to pacify you.” He twirled the knife so that he held it firmly in the palm of his hand. In a flash of purple light, the blade shifted into its sword form. He stepped forward. “Well, maybe not. Hunk asking for help on the engine systems might have made it this the easiest job I’ve ever been assigned. Hello? Ballistics and explosives? My specialty. Not hard to hide a few bombs in between a bunch of wires, duh.”

As if on cue, the Castle groaned again. Tharak lolled his head back, adjusting his glasses. “So, no hard feelings about the shoulders. I think we’re even.” He flipped the sword around in his hand, testing its weight. 

“Oh! Also, I have to kill you,” the Galra said matter-of-factly, lunging at Keith with a speed he didn’t know Tharak had.

Keith moved to the side, the Marmora blade whistling in his ear. He took a good look at Tharak, and then at the sword in his hand, and bolted down the hallway

While Keith was naturally fast, he was still shorter than the Galra. What Tharak lacked in inherent speed he made up for in the length of his legs. He ducked underneath one of the Galra’s careless blade swipes. He swept out with a leg but Tharak jumped back. He hadn’t been this good at fighting, or dodging, on Sector Alpha.

“Hold still, won’t you?” huffed Tharak, brandishing the blade of Marmora menacingly. The red lights reflected off of his glasses, making his eyes look an eerie orange. “You’re gonna die when the Castle blows up, anyway. Let me just expedite the process.”

Keith threw a punch, but it went wide as Tharak bent his neck to dodge. Tharak retaliated with a slash to the side, but Keith feinted and skirted out of the way. He turned a corner and dashed down the hallway, the Galra hot on his heels.

The Castle rumbled, the sounds of ripping and shredding metal shrill in his ears. A piece of ceiling broke off and collapsed right behind Keith and landed with a boom, slowing Tharak down. He could hear the Galra curse a word he had never heard before--probably something that didn’t quite translate well.

Keith’s perspective was skewed as the Castle tipped sharply to the side, and he was dropped unceremoniously onto one of the walls, which was now serving as the floor. He scrambled to his feet, hearing the ceiling that had fallen just before smash into the side of the wall. 

He slipped on the smooth walls, and the Castle dipped backwards, causing the entirety of the chamber to become a long vertical tube. His feet slipped out from under him and he was on his back, now falling headfirst towards the end of the corridor. He twisted in the air, trying to look behind him.

Tharak had activated the artificial gravity in his boots, which were lit up a soft blue. The portion of the ceiling that had fallen slid down towards him. With a snarl, he leaped off of the wall towards Keith, the blade of Marmora held high over his head. He straightened himself so that he fell faster than Keith, who was spread eagle, arms out as he fell.

Keith narrowed up his stance jerked his body out of the way of another swipe of his sword. This time, a few pieces of his hair came with it. The Castle tried to right itself. Keith pedaled his legs in the air so that when the corridor reverted to its horizontal state, he was already running.

Tharak slid on the ground behind him, taking a tumble as his gravity boots overcompensated for the Castle’s gyroscope. The ceiling panel smashed him to him and he was sent to the ground in a mess of armor and limbs. The Marmora sword clattered only a few feet away from him.

Keith sucked in a breath of air and stopped in his tracks. The sword returned to knife form in a flash of bright purple light. The thing had caused him so much trouble in the past few weeks that he was half-tempted to leave it, but he knew that was impossible. Ignoring the distant tremors from the ship that ran up through his legs, he cautiously walked towards Tharak.

The Galra didn’t move, so Keith walked lightly towards the knife and bent down, scooping it up in one fluid motion. He looked down at the knife, and then at Tharak. He could finish it all right now if he wasn’t dead already. All it took was one deft swipe of the blade.

His fingers closed around the hilt of the knife. It seemed like it had been so long since he had held it. 

Keith turned away from Tharak and disappeared down the hall, racing towards the hangar.

\---

Pidge and Hunk were the first ones to arrive to the hangar. The lions were dormant, all facing inward in the massive room. The chamber had held up well, but there were beams and bars exposed on the ceiling that threatened to drop down at any moment.

The trip had been arduous, but not complicated. With the gravity mechanism in their boots they had a relatively easy time traversing the difficult terrain.

Pidge looked up at the green lion, whose great head was bowed in the ‘powered off’ position. She turned her vision to the lion to its left; the red lion.

Her heart stopped. “Hunk?” she asked, her voice hollow, accompanied by the sounds of the Castle breaking around them.

“Yeah?” Hunk asked. When Pidge looked at him, she could see his sights were also on the red lion.

“Do you think Keith made it out of the cryostasis chamber?” Pidge whispered. The red lion was dormant as well, which hopefully meant that Keith wasn’t in danger. She was worried; was the lion’s connection with Keith severed when he was unconscious? Would Keith be trapped in the cryostasis chamber as the Castle exploded around him?

“He should have. The chambers are programmed to deactivate when emergency protocols are in effect. They aren’t prisons,” Hunk tried to reassure her, but his brows were furrowed in thought.

“We should look for him,” Pidge said, looking back at the entrance to the hangar.  As she did so, Lance, Allura, and Coran emerged from the doorway.

Allura had both hands on her shoulders, as though she was trying to comfort herself. Pidge would never have guessed anything was wrong from her face, which was kept steely and neutral. Lance and Coran flanked her, both looking stern and uncertain. 

“Princess,” called Pidge. Allura looked at her, earrings jingling with the motion. She wasn’t quite sure how to word what she wanted to say next, but she went ahead with it anyway. “We need to find Keith. We can’t leave with him.”

“I am aware,” Allura said with a slow nod. “I believe he has the sense to come to the hangar.”

“We can’t just assume he’ll be okay on a hunch,” Pidge argued, and was going to press further when the Castle shook violently. 

Booms thundered overhead. Flashes of light burst in tandem on the ceiling of the hangar. Metal rained from above, pelting the Paladins in shrapnel and other debris. Fire blossomed from the ceiling, stretching out over the hangar in a burning arc.

“The Galra are here. Get in your lions,” Allura said firmly, taking a step forward and past Pidge. “That is an order. All of you. Keith will come.”

Reluctantly, Pidge did so. There was no hesitation on her part, but she felt as though she was leaving a part of herself behind as she clambered into her lion. She supposed Allura felt the same way, who climbing into the blue lion with Lance. The Castle of Lions meant invariably more to the Princess than it did to her; she was merely a newcomer on a machine which was thousands of years old.

If Allura had the resolve to tell them to abandon it and the faith that Keith would arrive on time, then she supposed she had no other options.

Pidge grabbed the clutch and her lion roared to life. She could see the yellow lights of the lion’s eyes flicker on and flash through the poorly lit hangar, through the smoke that was filtering in.

Through the haze, Pidge saw a person emerge from the doorway of the hangar. The figure looked up at the lions with wide, yellow eyes, and their chest heaved with exertion. They had a helmet tucked under one arm, and a knife in the other.

“Keith!” Pidge called, grinning, hoping somehow that he would be able to hear her. She gripped her controls so that the green lion leaned in. 

She watched Keith step forward into the hangar, which was now dangerously close to falling apart. He went towards the direction of the red lion, ducking as the Castle shook and debris crashed down from the ceiling.

There was someone behind him. They were unfazed by the rocking of the ship and stormed towards Keith with determination, fervor, and unbridled anger.

Pidge could only look on in terror as Tharak brought a metal beam down on Keith’s head.

\---

Keith fit himself into the emergency evacuation suit, wondering if it was enough to shield him from the cold darkness of space. The suit was sleek and black, with two little ‘v’ shaped designs on the shoulders which glowed a soft blue. He tucked the pair of yellow glasses he had received into a storage pocket.

It wasn’t as though he would necessarily need the suit. He would be in the red lion soon enough, and the thin fabric did nothing to calm his nerves. He popped a helmet off of the rack and tucked it under his arm. He took one good look at the locker to make sure he wouldn’t need anything else, and sealed the door.

It was time to get to the red lion.

He stepped through the entryway into the hangar, the doors of which no longer slid cleanly. Smoke had engulfed the room, and he was half-tempted to put on the helmet now just so he could see clearly.

What he could see were the illuminated eyes of three active lions. Good, the rest of them had made it out. The black and red lions were dormant on either side of the green, blue, and yellow ones. Keith swallowed, letting out a cough as smoke entered his lungs. Between ragged breaths he looked at the red lion, and stepped towards it. The entire Castle rocked and he held his arms up, trying to protect himself from the falling debris.

Stars scattered across his vision, bright bursts of light filtering behind his eyelids. He fell bodily to the ground, his entire world jumbled. He flipped himself onto his back, groaning, reaching for his head and dropping both his knife and his helmet.

“Bad idea, letting me live like that,” Tharak snickered, appearing only as a blurry purple and blue shape in Keith’s distorted vision. The Galra dropped whatever he had hit him with and it landed with a metallic clang to his right. 

Keith felt the blood trickle down his temple and over the curve of his cheek. With numb fingers, he reached for the helmet. His fingers closed around the side of it.

“You’re making this job kind of hard for me. Stop getting in my way,” the Galra seethed, his knuckles cracking audibly as he bent his fingers back together. The ceiling wrenched itself open, red flames bursting out of the tear like water running from a faucet. A seam on the wall split open and creaked, the metal around it folding like paper.

Keith lifted the helmet over his head, the visor shuttering closed. With the other hand, he grabbed his knife and weakly held it out in a warning. The wall crinkled behind the lions, which were revving into action.

Tharak swiped the knife out of Keith’s hand, and plunged it down into his stomach.

Keith screamed, blood pooling around his abdomen. His fingers clutched the knife, trying to tear it out of the wound. The emergency evacuation suit repaired itself quickly around the knife, but the wound it was buried in was just under the vacuum seal. 

He coughed, blood spattering on the visor which shielded him from the elements. Tharak stepped forward, pressing an armored foot on the hilt of Keith’s knife. The blade sunk down into his abdomen, and Keith went numb with pain.

Keith desperately reached forward, seeing double through the waves of agony that flowed from his stomach. 

Tharak grinned, a wide toothy and broken smile. He stepped forward to finish Keith off…

...And disappeared between the jaws of the green lion.

Concentrated explosions went off one by one in the hangar, ripping the chamber to shreds. It split open and burst at the seams, the rending of metal accompanied by a chorus of booms which rang in Keith’s failing ears. The integrity of the walls was compromised and the hangar crumpled inwards. The eerie purple of Galra lasers rained from above as shrapnel, debris, and the lions of Voltron were shot out into the darkness and stars beyond.

The vacuum of space welcomed them all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: You may be wondering where the rest of the fic is! Well, I've decided to split this story up into two stories, and since I wasn't quite sure the direction I wanted it to go in, the subsequent two chapters will be edited and put up standalone at a later date. Sorry about that, but I didn't feel confident to go on with it the way it was. This fic is going to be revised and beta'd, so there should be a shiny new version with, hopefully, no typos soon. Thanks for sticking with me! And thank you for reading my first fanfiction!


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